bahjeez.com

Matt Cole criticizes SanDisk microSD cards because a SanDisk Ultra card failed on him after years of relying on the brand, and that single failure destroyed the only copy of his Wikipedia bot's source code. His criticism is not a one-off complaint: it comes from someone who has run microSD endurance testing for roughly 2.5 years, destroyed over 150 cards across more than 30 brands, and currently has over 100 cards from 30 brands under load testing. He published his argument as an open letter titled "Dear SanDisk, Please Do Better."

Who Matt Cole is, and why his opinion carries weight

According to the post on bahjeez.com, Cole has been endurance testing microSD cards for about two and a half years. His testing has been covered by TechRadar, TechSpot, Tom's Hardware, and IGN, among other outlets and social media posts. He maintains a browsable public database of his test data.

That background matters because his criticism of SanDisk is framed as an informed user's conclusion, not a casual review. He states plainly that he believes he knows what he is talking about, and asks readers to take the reliability problem seriously on that basis.

SanDisk used to be his default choice

The open letter is explicit that the criticism is a reversal, not a long-held grudge:

• SanDisk cards were cheap and readily available.
• He considered them rock-solid.
• He used them in all of his single-board computers.
• He built a "redneck supercomputer" — a cluster of more than 35 single-board computers, all using SanDisk Ultras as primary storage — without issues.

In other words, the person now warning about SanDisk reliability was, by his own account, one of the brand's heavier and more loyal users.

The failure that started the criticism

One day, one of those SanDisk Ultra cards failed. Of all the cards in his setup, it was the worst possible one to lose, because it held the source code for a Wikipedia bot he had written.

The bot crawled Wikipedia looking for cut-and-paste moves — cases where a user cuts content from one page, pastes it into another, and turns the original into a redirect. Cole explains why that matters:

• It splits a page's history in two, leaving earlier contributions behind on the old page, so anyone trying to reconstruct the full list of contributors to a page will miss everyone who contributed before the move.
• The talk page does not move automatically, so any discussion in progress at the time of the move gets orphaned on a page most users will never see.

The bot generated reports of these moves so administrators could fix them. Its source code existed only on that microSD card, with no backup anywhere. As Cole puts it, it is likely gone forever.

What the criticism actually claims

The open letter does not argue that every SanDisk card is defective. Its claim is narrower and stated directly: SanDisk "has a problem" with its microSD cards, and the company should do better. The evidence behind that claim is:

The single failed card is described in the letter as "just a single data point." The weight of the argument rests on the broader testing project, with the data loss serving as the reason he started paying attention to the problem.

How to read this if you are evaluating SanDisk cards

A few practical points follow from what the letter does and does not say:

• The criticism is about reliability under endurance load, not speed or price. Cole's stated history with SanDisk was positive on both of those fronts.
• The failure mode that matters most here is data loss, not card death. The card dying was the trigger; the absence of a backup is what made it irreversible.
• The claim is brand-level, based on aggregate testing. If you want to judge it for yourself, the letter points to his public database of test results as the underlying evidence.
• One failure is not the whole case. Cole says so himself — the case is the testing program plus the failure, not the failure alone.

If you use microSD cards as primary storage in single-board computers or similar always-on devices, the takeaway from the letter is less about which brand to buy and more about treating any card as a single point of failure: keep the source code, configs, and anything else you cannot recreate somewhere other than the card itself.

bahjeez.com is Matt Cole's personal blog, subtitled "My little corner of the Internet." It is the home base for his long-running microSD card endurance testing project, where he documents failures, publishes an open letter to SanDisk, and links out to media coverage. If you want to find his raw test data, follow his ongoing results, or browse his writing by date, the site's navigation gives you four main paths: Posts, Recent Posts, Recent Comments, and Archives. The sections below explain what each one gives you and how to use them.

What you'll find on bahjeez.com

The blog is organized around Cole's own testing work rather than general tech news. According to the site's own excerpt, he has been running endurance tests on microSD cards for roughly two and a half years, has destroyed over 150 cards from more than 30 brands, and has another 100-plus cards from 30 brands still under test. He also states he created a browsable database of his data for anyone to see, and that his work has been covered by outlets including TechRadar, TechSpot, Tom's Hardware, and IGN.

That means the site serves two related purposes:

• A running log of test results and commentary, including his open letter to SanDisk titled "Dear SanDisk, Please Do Better."
• A pointer to a separate browsable database where the raw endurance data lives.

Navigating the site

The page evidence lists these navigation elements: Posts, Posts pagination, Recent Posts, Recent Comments, and Archives. Here's how to use each.

Posts and Posts pagination

The main Posts feed is where new entries appear. Because the list is paginated, older entries move to subsequent pages rather than loading all at once. Use Posts pagination to step backward through the timeline if you're looking for something that isn't on the first page.

Recent Posts

Recent Posts is a shortcut to the newest entries, useful if you're checking in for updates rather than reading chronologically. If you're following the SanDisk letter or a new batch of card failures, start here.

Recent Comments

Recent Comments shows the latest reader replies. This is worth checking because corrections, counter-data points, and brand-specific questions often surface in comments before they appear in a full post.

Archives

Archives groups posts by date, which is the most reliable way to find older material when you know roughly when it was published but not its title. If you're tracing how the testing project evolved, the archive is the better tool than scrolling the paginated feed.

Finding the microSD test data

The most important detail for data-seekers: Cole states he "created a browsable database of my data for all to see." That database is the place to go for raw results rather than the blog feed itself. The blog posts provide context, narrative, and conclusions; the database provides the underlying records.

A practical approach:

1. Start with the most recent Posts entry about the testing project to get the current state of play.
2. Follow any link in that post to the browsable database for the full dataset.
3. Use Archives to trace earlier phases if you want to compare results over time.
4. Check Recent Comments for reader-supplied data or challenges to his findings.

Why the site is worth reading

Cole's testing is unusual in scale. Destroying 150-plus cards across 30-plus brands, with another 100-plus still under load, is not a typical review process. His stated motivation is personal as well as analytical: he describes losing the source code for a Wikipedia bot he built — one that crawled the site looking for cut-and-paste page moves so administrators could fix them — when a SanDisk microSD card failed, and he had no backup. That single failure is what turned him from a SanDisk loyalist into a critic, and it's the thread connecting his Wikipedia bot work to his current testing project.

For readers, that context matters: the site is not neutral product coverage. It's one person's sustained, documented experience, with the data published openly enough that you can check his conclusions against his records.

bahjeez.com is the personal site of Matt Cole, and its most notable project is a long-running microSD card endurance test. Cole has been running the test for about 2.5 years, has destroyed more than 150 cards from over 30 brands, and has another 100-plus cards from 30 brands still under load. The point is to measure how long microSD cards actually last when continuously written to, and he publishes the results in a browsable public database.

What the project measures

The test is an endurance test, not a speed or benchmark test. Cards are put under sustained load and run until they fail, so the useful output is a failure point per card rather than a peak read/write number. That makes the data relevant if you care about how long a card survives in always-on hardware — single-board computers, home servers, cameras, or anything else that writes constantly.

Scale and duration

• Roughly 2.5 years of continuous testing at the time of the open letter to SanDisk.
• Over 150 cards destroyed across more than 30 brands.
• Over 100 additional cards from 30 brands still in the testing pool.
• Results collected into a browsable database rather than posted only as one-off articles.

The combination of sample size and elapsed time is what separates this from a typical single-card review. A card that dies in a week and a card that dies in two years are both single data points; hundreds of cards across dozens of brands starts to show patterns.

Why it got attention

Cole's testing has been covered by TechRadar, TechSpot, Tom's Hardware, IGN, and various social media posts, according to his own account on the site. The TechRadar link is the one pricing/coverage reference present in the site data. The coverage is a signal that the dataset is treated as a useful independent source, not just a personal blog post.

The SanDisk finding

The site's most prominent post is an open letter titled "Dear SanDisk, Please Do Better." Cole states that SanDisk used to be his default choice — cheap, widely available, and reliable in his experience — including in a cluster of more than 35 single-board computers using SanDisk Ultra cards as primary storage. He reports that one of those cards eventually failed, and that the failure destroyed the only copy of source code for a Wikipedia bot he had written. The bot scanned Wikipedia for cut-and-paste page moves and generated reports so administrators could fix them; the code was not backed up elsewhere and he considers it likely gone.

That single failure is presented as the starting point, not the conclusion. The broader claim in the letter is that SanDisk microSD cards have a problem that shows up across his larger dataset, which is why the scale of the testing matters to the argument.

How to use the data

If you are choosing a card for a workload that writes continuously, the database is the part worth checking: look for cards of the capacity and model you are considering, and compare how long they lasted relative to others from the same brand and price tier. Treat it as one input among several — endurance results depend on the specific card, capacity, and load pattern, and a brand's behavior can change between production runs. The site is a personal project, so the raw database and the open letter are the primary sources; media coverage is secondary reporting on the same results.

bahjeez.com is the personal website and blog of Matt Cole, described in its own title as "My little corner of the Internet." Its main draw is an ongoing, long-running microSD card endurance testing project: Cole reports having run endurance tests for 2.5 years, destroyed over 150 cards from more than 30 brands, and kept over 100 cards from 30 brands under active testing, with a browsable public database of the results. The site is a blog rather than a store, service, or product site.

What you'll find on the site

The site follows a standard personal-blog structure, with sections labeled Posts, Posts pagination, Recent Posts, Recent Comments, and Archives. In practice, that means:

• Long-form posts on Cole's testing work and technical projects, including an open letter to SanDisk titled "Dear SanDisk, Please Do Better."
• A public data set — Cole states he created a browsable database of his microSD endurance data for anyone to view.
• Project write-ups beyond storage testing, such as a Wikipedia bot he built to detect cut-and-paste page moves (where a user cuts content from one page, pastes it into another, and turns the original into a redirect, splitting the page history and orphaning the talk page).

Why the microSD testing gets attention

Cole's testing has been covered by outlets including TechRadar, TechSpot, Tom's Hardware, and IGN, according to his own post. The core claim behind the attention is scale and duration: years of continuous write load across a large sample of cards, rather than short benchmark runs.

A concrete example from the site illustrates the stakes: one of his SanDisk Ultra cards failed while holding the only copy of his Wikipedia bot's source code, which he says had no backup and is likely gone forever. That single failure is what turned his testing into a broader reliability investigation.

Who it's for

• Buyers comparing microSD brands who want endurance and failure data rather than peak speed ratings.
• Single-board computer users — Cole mentions using SanDisk Ultras as primary storage across a cluster of over 35 single-board computers.
• Anyone curious about long-term flash storage reliability, including how cards behave under sustained load.

What it is not

There are no pricing signals, payment platforms, or product listings on the site, so it isn't a shop. It's also not a general tech news outlet — coverage of his work appears elsewhere; bahjeez.com is where the raw testing and personal commentary live.

Matt Cole created a Wikipedia bot that scanned the site for "cut-and-paste moves" and generated reports so administrators could fix them. The connection to his microSD testing is personal and direct: the bot's source code was stored on a single microSD card, he had no backup, and that card failed — so the code was likely lost forever. On bahjeez.com he describes this as one data point in a much larger pattern that pushed him toward endurance testing storage media.

What the bot did

A cut-and-paste move is when an editor cuts content from one Wikipedia page, pastes it into another, and turns the original page into a redirect. Cole's bot crawled Wikipedia looking for these moves and produced reports of what it found, which administrators could then use to go in and repair the damage.

Why those moves are a problem

Two specific harms come up in his account:

• Split page history. The move leaves contributions made by earlier editors behind on the old page. Anyone trying to build a list of everyone who contributed to a page — for attribution, for example — won't see the people who edited it before the move.
• Orphaned talk pages. The talk page doesn't move automatically with the content. If a discussion about the page was underway when the move happened, later readers won't see it. Cole describes it as sitting in a corner most users will never find.

The bot's job was detection and reporting, not automatic repair — administrators made the actual fixes.

How it connects to the microSD testing

The link is a single failure with an outsized cost:

1. The bot's source code lived on one microSD card.
2. There was no backup anywhere.
3. The card failed.
4. The code is likely gone permanently.

Cole frames this as one data point among many, not the whole story. It sits inside a larger testing effort he describes on bahjeez.com: roughly 2.5 years of endurance testing on microSD cards, more than 150 cards destroyed across over 30 brands, and over 100 cards from 30 brands still under load. He also says he built a browsable database of the results and that the work has been covered by outlets including TechRadar, TechSpot, Tom's Hardware, and IGN.

Why the story matters for how you read his testing

The bot incident explains the motivation behind the project rather than proving anything about any specific card. It's an anecdote about what a storage failure can cost when there's no redundancy — here, a piece of software that had no copy anywhere else.

Two practical points follow from it, and they apply regardless of which brand you buy:

• A single card is a single point of failure. If the only copy of something lives on one microSD card, a card failure is also a data loss event.
• Endurance claims are worth testing, not assuming. Cole's stated reason for running hundreds of cards under load is to find out how long they actually last, rather than trusting the reputation a brand may have built up.

For the specific criticism he directs at SanDisk and the details of his testing methodology and database, see the related questions on his SanDisk open letter and on the endurance testing project itself.