Repeated SD Card Disconnects on Surface Pro 5
I have been using a 128GB Micro-SD card as additional storage on my Surface Pro (both Surface Pro 4 and Surface Pro 5) for some years and regularly run into issues where the SD card doesn’t stay connected. Randomly, it will disconnect and a few seconds later reconnect. This is especially frustrating because I often host a virtual disk image on the SD card and when it reconnects I have to manually reconnect the virtual disk too.
I came across an old post with a similar issue on Surface Pro 3. I recall that there have been a variety of SD card issues with SP3 over the years that didn’t crop up with other editions, but I figured this was worth a try.
The change is to switch from the RealTek driver to a generic USB driver as follows:
- Press [Win]+X then select Device Manager.
- Expand Universal Serial Bus Controller, right-click on the RealTek USB 3.0 Card Reader driver, then select Update Driver Software.
- From the pop-up, select Browse my computer for driver software.
- On the next screen, select Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.
- Make sure Show compatible hardware is selected, then click on USB Mass Storage Device, then click Next.
- It should say that Windows has successfully updated your driver software, so you can now click Close.
- You should be prompted to restart in order for the changes to take effect.
I only just made this change a few days ago so I will see how it goes, but so far I haven’t had any further disconnects.