[njovin]

Anecdotally, and as a big fan of Apple laptops, I've had so much trouble with their USB and SDCard hardware when it comes to data transfer that I wonder if I'm cursed or if I'm crazy.

Transferring a about a dozen GB of data over USB3 is a crapshoot depending on the drive you have. Even amongst name-brands with similar advertised speeds, some thumb drives are basically useless with my 2024 MBP and I've had similar issues with a previous 2015 MBP model. The transfer speeds will be so slow as to be considered unusable.

On the 2024 MBP, using ANY microsd card adapter with any microsdcard causes the card to immediately overheat, and the card will never be properly usable by the OS. Only full-size SDCards work.

I've seen some posts about this elsewhere, but it seems to me like one of the few peripherals on this expensive piece of kit being incompatible with the vast majority of the hardware it's supposed to work with would be kind of a big deal.

[giantrobot]

I've had similar issues with microSD in a variety of adapters. I think the core issue is most microSD cards just aren't built, in terms of thermals, for sustained writes. In most devices they're either read-heavy loads or burst-y writes. When you stick them in a warm laptop and do a lot of writes they overheat and start throwing errors.

For many cards their drive controller might advertise and support higher UHS speeds the Flash memory is likely the cheapest silicon that can just barely pass acceptance tests. When I encounter cards that fail sustained writes I've had good luck using pv's (pipe viewer) rate limit. I stick it between dd invocations. This has worked well when writing OS images for Raspberry Pis onto cheap microSD cards. They're fine in the Pis but would fail trying to write OS images.

[njovin]

I've read the same, but for me, a newly-formatted microSD will overheat as soon as it's plugged into the MBP. The OS may be reading/writing something to cause that, but it's automated as part of the mounting process from what I've seen.

[giantrobot]

You can try 'sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/microSDCardName' which will disable Spotlight indexing on it. While a Spotlight index of an empty disk shouldn't cause overheating...there's bugs somewhere in the chain. To say nothing of quality issues on the cards themselves. I often use an app called Disk Arbitrator[0] to mount disks read-only or block automounts when I'm dealing with SD cards because of overheating issues.

[0] https://github.com/aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator