Vita Memory Cards are not reliable

While not a primary console for me anymore, I do enjoy taking out the Vita from time to time. It’s still really great hardware to this day.

I have a 1000 model in White and the dock, so it’s always ready to go.

Sadly, it seems my 16GB card is no longer readable. Seems I lost my Persona 4 save. Ugh. The game is so long too and I wasn’t done.

What sucks about this, especially given the focus on this community, is that these things are a proprietary standard, so there is limited stock. They’re not too pricey still. But rather annoying.

Has anyone fixed a Vita memory card?

I remember when the Vita came out the SDF was justifying the high memeory card prices due to Sony’s use of the highest quality nand possible.

I dont think they’re fixable but you can probably prolong the life of them by keeping them under 75% full so that wear levelling has a chance to help avoid failure.

Another option if youre OK taking up the game card slot is SD2Vita. I replaced my 64GB card entirely with a 200GB SD card this way, which is fine for me since I only have one physical Vita game.

I was burned as well. Bought a 64GB memory card at a huge premium compared to SD cards at the time and it corrupted itself after a year and a half. Lost dozens of hours of progress on a multitude of games. Wasn’t able to resurrect it unfortunately.

Rather shocking that the NAND used was poor quality, you’d expect them to at least be reliable if they aren’t delivering good read/write speeds.

I’m mostly digital but I have some cards. May just soft mod to dump them.

I love the hardware. It just sucks the default options are not reliable long term and are limited in stock.

Only one I heard with a high failure rate is the 64gb. I’ve had my 32gb since launch with. I problems so far.

I keep meaning to look into sd2vita because of this.

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I’ve got a few of the adapters, I just haven’t decided to sit down and migrate everything over. I just need to back up everything via QCMA and install SD2VITA.

I’ll keep my 32gb in there just for emulation, I hear GBA is full speed now thanks to some bug fixes.

Vita homebrew is seriously trivial to set up, and SD2Vita is pretty bombproof. Just make sure you get one of the more recent adapters if you have a slim vita.

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Can you use SD2Vita without CFW?

No, but there’s no reason not to install CFW on your Vita. I’ve had mine on since day one and I haven’t been banned. It’s a game changer with PSOne classics especially since you can not only install your own but put them through Adrenaline a custom loader that allows save states and fast-forwarding.

ditto this. even if you purely play software you own, the ability to install translation patches/undubs, and use the entirety of the PSP emulator space to play almost every PSP or PSX game under the sun is worth it by itself. Not to mention SD2Vita, plugins, the ability to bypass sony’s servers and software to store software/saves/ etc, and emulators/homebrew ports. Really no down side.

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The fact that Sony used the cheapest and crappies NAND they had access to has been known pretty much since day one. All of the tests sites did and everything confirmed these were poorly made Micro SD Cards in a different body, that they charged 2 - 3x the amount for. I can’t find it now, but I could have sworn one of the sites opened one up and found it to have just bottom of the barrel nand chips in it, but I can’t find anything on that now so maybe I am wrong.

Yeah, I remember reading the Digital Foundry analysis around launch day and the read/write speeds were far short off the class 10 SD cards you could pick up for a fraction of the price. Wasn’t expecting them to be unreliable junk though at that time!

The storage situation in general really could have done with more work, I still can’t believe they bundled game data, DLC and game saves for each game. Deleting an icon off the home screen would delete the lot, I remember losing my Ninja Gaiden Sigma save for good just because I deleted it to make some space on my tiny launch day 8GB memory card. And content manager backups are pretty unreliable too.