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Leica SD Cards
One of the SD memory cards for my Leica GS18 has gone AWOL. New ones from Allen Precision are $225. I know from experience that ordinary SD cards will fit and work in the office, but fail under field conditions.
“Industrial” SD cards – cards with large operation temperature ranges – are available on Amazon for under $25. I’m asking if anybody has experience using those. Do they work reliably in a receiver?
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4 Replies
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I’m using the Leica 1200 and these still run CF cards, not SD but I guess it’s a similar situation. In my personal case, I have noticed that the Leica-branded 256MB CF are very expensive as well. Instead, we opted for the SanDisk CF5000 1GB and the STEC 1GB (both are industrial grade cf cards).
Basically, CF cards are a trademark of SanDisk. What I noticed is that the SanDisk CF5000 works flawlessly and has never let me down. I have never experienced any data loss/corruption with this model. The STEC is kinda different. It will work greatly with the SmartRover but many times it won’t get recognized by the GX1230+ base units. So we are now sticking with the SanDisk CF5000 on both our total station TPS1200 as well as our GNSS receivers.
I know a french acquaintance that even uses regular Lexar cards saying that he doesn’t bother with Leica’s overpriced accessories. I can’t talk for him but I only wanted to share my experience.
Billy -
We have been using Leica GPS for over 20 years, and almost exclusively DO NOT use the expensive Leica cards. The cards we use are high quality, and I can’t remember a single time one has failed on us in the field and we lost data. But we have had cards fail (very rare) but have had a backup in the box and keep on rolling. And we work in some very extreme weather.
But I get it, lose a single days worth of data and you could have bought a hand full of Leica industrial strength storage cards. But in our experience, with field work and firmware updates, we have never had an issue.
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Mr OK,
Leica has always pushed their memory & one of the first things they ask when you have issues is if you are using their memory. Over the decades I’ve used both Leica and others branded memory with but have had both give up the ghost. I just lost a couple of day’s worth of base station data plus freaked out my GS16 when a SanDisk extreme micro-SD went south (that is the only data I have lost).
It is not just the temperature range that matters when choosing NAND flash memory products for critical operations. NAND memory comes in a couple of architectural flavors. SLC offers the best reliability but is the most expensive, has smaller capacity and harder to find. If I had to guess, that is probably what Leica’s cards utilize. Most consumer grade SD cards are MLC or TLC. I have been using Transend SLC SD memory cards in my MS50. I need to find a couple of micro-SD with SLC for my GS16s. I’ll let you know what I find at the next PLSO chapter meeting.
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In my experience the industrial SD cards work fine for logging static data, transferring files, etc you absolutely do want to use Leica SD cards for firmware updates. I have 3 fairly recent experiences to prove it
1. Leica GR30 – refused to upgrade firmware with the Lexar 128GB SD card I was using to store static logs, no issues whatsoever for storing data but simply failed to upgrade firmware from it. Firmware update worked flawlessly with a Leica SD card
2. Leica TS16 – had been using USB flash drives to upgrade firmware for years on these robots. With the latest firmware I did the same thing as before and one of the instruments exhibited very bizarre behaviour, it would not shut down properly. Lengthy troubleshooting eventually led to reinstalling the firmware using a Leica SD card, which resolved the issue.
3. Leica GS15 – Recently upgraded a receiver to the latest firmware using one of the industrial SD cards that some of our receivers use for logging static data without any issues, and this particular receiver also exhibited strange behaviour where it would not stay shut down, automatically turned itself back on. Reinstalled with Leica card and issue resolved. Most of our GS18/GS15 receivers use Leica SD cards but a couple of them have the industrial non-Leica branded ones.
For what it’s worth, I will be using exclusively Leica SD cards for firmware updates on all equipment going forward, even though I don’t have a logical explanation why it can make a difference but doesn’t always necessarily matter
Jacob Wall
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