sd card on iMac not working with el capitan

Hi Drew, I had just about the same problem, but...

I just started using a Transcend Jetdrive Lite (128Gb) on my Macbook Pro 13" Late 2013.

Straight from the packing I just inserted it into the MBP and it seems to work just fine, even after sleep.

I ran into some problems wanting to sync my OneDrive to this card, which is not possible because it is a removable media, the OneDrive configurator wont allow it.

Innitially I thought it might be just because it was an ExFat formatted drive so I used disk Util to reformat the drive into OSX Journaled > thats when all the trouble started (at least for me).

Now I'm stuck with the card disappearing after sleep, tried the driver you mentioned, but no joy.

I cant help but thinking it was just fine when I inserted the Jetdrive fro the package, I might just buy another one to test.

Cheers ! Richard

MrDru wrote:

Thanks DrToz

I'm using a transcend Jetdrive (128gb) as an additional document store in my SD card slot... Running El Capitan 10.11.5 on a McBook Air (13, Mid2012) with all the problems everyone else was having... downloaded and installed the "PC/SD Driver Installer" (18-Feb-2016, Version 1.1.2, Mac version of course) Rebooted with the SD Card removed...

• Did a System Report and the Card Reader was visible again (no need for a NVRAM reboot, hooray!)
• Inserted the SD card - mounted without issue...
• Read/Write to a few documents for a while, no disappearance...
• then for the real kicker... I put the MacBook Air to sleep... No issues...

3 days later, and at least 20 sleep cycles later and still no disappearing acts!

*fingers crossed* this stays like this... and when apple does another system update - they don't break this as a result...

-drew

Hey Richard...

Outside of the errors I've had found Transcend also had a utility for the JetDrive lite...

http://transcend-info.com/Support/No-638

After downloading and installing the 'JetDrive Toolbox' click on the JetDrive Lite tab, then on the side, the 'Power Save' ... then toggle the "Allows your MacBook to wake up from Standby mode with JetDrive Lite inserted" to ON...

I hope that brings you joy... I'm tempted if this fails too to move over to a Samsung 128gb Lite (ultra small thumb drive instead) as its USB3 (the SD Card slot is limited to USB2 speeds) and hopefully without these problems.

Fingers crossed Richard!

-drew

Hi Drew, thanks for the update.

I went upstairs to get my Macbook (to download your suggestion), opened it and (of course) the SD was gone.

So I opened the browser and started searching for the download you mentioned when suddenly my SD card appeared on the desktop !

Crazy right ? So I closed my Macbook, waited for it to go to sleep, opened it and the SD card was gone but after about 30 sec. it appeared....

Next I downloaded the Transcend tools found the menu option only to see that it was already set to 'ON'.

So this does bring the SD card back to life, but (on my system) it takes about 30 sec... way to long because in the meantime Onedrive already tries to Sync and comes to a halt because the card is missing.

Just out of curiosity I set this option to 'OFF' and closed my Macbook again.

After I let it sleep for a while, opened it and the SD card bas back immediately as soon as the display came to life.

since then I have opened and closed my Macbook several times and every time the SD card was right there on the desktop.

Even did a reboot and sleep, open, sleep, open to test.

I still don't know what it is that I've done, or maybe all this fiddling made it somehow work again.

During the whole proces (earlier that evening) I did install this tool :

http://blog.appgineers.de/post/101608761084/new-advanced-feature-for-nifty-minid rive-users

But couldn't make it work so I deleted it again.

I'm gonna leave it for now, but wanted to let you know that 'somehow' OSX 10.11.5 can seem to work with the SD card.

I will keep checking this thread for updates and if there is anything I can do, let me know !

Cheers ! Richard

Well last night the JetDrive disappeared as it had after sleeping for a few hours yesterday. So I rebooted and the SD card did come right back without an NVRAM reset - which is better news than it has been previously.

This morning I woke the machine up to see the SD card visible still, but the custom icon for the drive I had had defaulted to the system style icon for the SD drive... I've noticed this a few times in the past, and I can only assume that maybe the transcend utility has remounted the drive.

From memory I think the more recent versions of Mac OS and probably from 2010 -> for portable machines, there are three different levels of sleep...

• First level is when you close your laptop, it almost just turns off the display only, for the first 10 minutes.
• Then the machine goes into deeper sleep where it turns off all accessories such as USB devices, keyboard, mouse, anything like SD/USB storage devices, but keeps a bit of the processor running for CRON (time-based job scheduler for the OS) for networking request and other time based system tasks...
• Then say if a backup or software update request pop's up on the CRON list, it will wake up for those tasks into a sort of first level sleep... I'd imagine all peripherals network/USB/SD would wake-up... also referred to as 'Power-nap'... then again all three states could be included in this power-nap state
• [The very last state of sleep is that hibernate/safe sleep which is reserved by the system (or by command line) for empty batteries where everything in ram is transferred to the HDD/SSD then the system completely turns off]

I could see the wake-up for backup/software update, CRON request (Power-nap) could cause a few problems as it sleeps/un-sleeps a few time too fast for all drivers to re-initate... maybe?... I'm going to try a few days with Power-nap turned off to see if that also helps.

I have the same issue as everyone here.....and it is simply outrageous Apple hasn't tackled this.

I don't believe the switch story.....that would be the first SD slot I've seen with a switch....I did try it but it didn't help. Also....if it really IS a switch, why does a reboot make the machine recognize the card ?

Anyway.....all this SD card trouble made me remember I still had a dead simple SD to USB adapter which I once got free with a Transcend SD card.

Surprise surprise, this solves ALL the SD card problems, I can remove it and re-insert it again and again it shows up just fine every time. Also no problems when the machine has been in sleep mode.......BUT it is a crazy work around that shouldn't be necessary and and it's a crying shame that Apple is leaving us in the dark here !!!

Anyway, these adapters cost close to nothing and save a lot of annoyance....

http://nl.aliexpress.com/item/Hot-Sale-USB-2-0-Micro-USB-OTG-Adapter-SD-T-Flash- Memory-Card-Reader-for/32600124475.html?…

but they do take up a USB port and you'll have to reach around the back on iMacs.....

It's the same situation with floppy drive support through USB. They killed it and don't care about it. Yes I still use floppy's for very special reasons and it used to work great before El Capitan. In fact, it STILL works great when I run Windows under Parallels !!!! So there is no reason at all other than Apple wishing to save a few MB's of data by removing the USB floppy drivers.....

I've been an Apple user since 2006 and I'm still happy, but they really should change their ways. With the return to a simple interface on iTunes it seems some people are actually waking up now.....but they should continue on this.....

Follow up on testing...

• Power-nap function turned off does not help - turned back to default ON state.
• I'm now having problems with the iSight camera on the Macbook Air (it's attached to the same USB2 HUB as the SD card) it's now reporting it's not available for FaceTime etc. sometimes it's visible in the system report... much the same with the SD card reader...
• Going to remove the 3rd party SD Card reader driver and go back to the Apple driver instead.

Also - moving all data off this Transcend card and onto that Samsung FIT USB3 drive instead. I feel more confidence in it than a dodgy SD card reader.

Hope everyone has better luck

Well, I've got to eat some of my words...It MUST be a hardware problem.

Sent my machine, still under Apple Care thank Heavens, back to Apple. They replaced the Loci board, the Discrete GPU (bottom case), the I/O Board, and two (?) I/O cables. All is well, and I have a half-brand-new computer.

I wish I had sent it in when this first started...word to the wise for the rest, at least those still under warranty.

Cheers!!!

Have a mid 2012 Macbook Pro. Just updated to El Capitan this morning and so far everything seems to be working (although much slower) EXCEPT for the SDHC card reader. It worked yesterday before installing El Capitan. Have tried reseting the PRAM etc. rebooting and still the card is not showing up. Have set the mac to never sleep, The USB hub with a memory stick does work so far. This is so frustrating as have spent almost the last 12 hours trying to fix the problem.

Has Apple come up with a solution to fix this issue yet?

That is actually unusually bad behavior. In my experience, El Capitan would always mount the SDHC card after a boot, it was subsequent inserts (like after sleep) that it would go bad. One thing to check, make sure in Finder Preferences that your selection to show external disks and hard disks is still active, it may have been disabled by the OS update.

This weekend I rebooted and my SDHC did not show up. Rather upset me, but I ran Disk Utility and the card was present. Odd, somehow my Finder Preference setting got changed, the SDHC was mounting, but invisible. Changed preference setting and the card was back, for a time.

Don't expect anything until Tim blesses us with macOS Sierra. Don't expect too much though.

And finally, you mention everything is slower. For me, it was applications like Calendar that slowed to a crawl (iCloud?). Other applications seemed to be blissfully ignorant of El Capitan. Calendar is still sluggish and almost useless, even after trying some of the suggestions found here. And one more thing, resetting PRAM has been a red herring since about when Apple got rid of the 68K. It is techno babble for take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

Tried Disc utility again with no luck. Also checked the Finder preferences to make sure external discs etc were turned on. The card reader is still not working. Getting the coloured spinning wheel a lot. Tried to do a time machine backup last night and it quit halfway, lol ( I did a backup just before installing El Capitan, thank goodness ) Have decided to upgrade to a SSD and put in more RAM so will get the tech to see if he can find a problem with the card reader.

Hi all!

PRAM reset did work for me. Prior to that, I had to reboot to see the SD card. Now eject/slot in works every time.

🙂

Glad doing the PRAM reset worked for you. Ended up putting in a SSD and Memory in myself so didn't take it to a tech. The macbook pro runs so much faster now, wished had done the upgrades years ago. The SD card slot still doesn 't work, despite resetting the PRAM etc. Got an external card reader now which works great!

I've read through the many pages of this problem and I have tried many of the suggestions. Zapping the PRAM doesn't work. The toothpick suggestion worked for a day. Mostly I just keep restarting. I have also read the comments concerning Apple's lack of effort about solving this issue and attmepts by various people to solve it via coding rewrites and the like. Some people think it's hardware. Others think it's Apple's software. ONe thing no one has suggested but I have noticed it repeatedly only computer is Adobe. Everyone here must be using Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and the like. Everytime I open an Adobe program or when one is open, I have a problem. I can leave my chip in for days and as long as I am not accessing anything by Adobe, nothing happens. But if I open Photoshop, or even Bridge or Acrobat, I lose access to my chip. Look to see if you have Photoshop open when you are accessing you chip. I think there is an incompatability issue between Adobe and El Capitan's coding in regards to the UPB ports. zI have an order version of CS so I can't speak for newer versions but who knows where the incompatability lies. Just a thought.

I should be proofing better. So to clarify:

"One thing no one has suggested but I have noticed repeatedly is Adobe programs on my computer."

I meant USB ports.

I also have an "older" version of CS.

Sorry.