The strange case of the Recalcitrant Roku 3 and the microSD card

I’ve been pretty hard on HP Inc. regarding my misadventures with that company’s inkjet printers, so I thought I’d go hard on another consumer product for a change while making some relevant design observations. While visiting my daughter in Silicon Valley recently, I noticed that her ancient Roku 3 media streaming box was behaving badly. It was responding very slowly. I got the Roku purple screen of death when exiting the YouTube app. I’d seen these symptoms before and suspected that the Roku needed more storage for the various channel apps so that it did not need to reload them from the Internet every time we switched from Netflix or AppleTV+ to YouTube. My daughter then told me that the Roku 3 occasionally complained that it needed a microSD card, which finally confirmed my diagnosis.

Roku 3 Streaming Media Player. Image credit: Roku

Roku uses a microSD card for memory expansion, and because I’d done this before on my own unit, I knew about a couple of gotchas in the upgrade process. First, the Roku 3 designers thoughtfully hid the microSD card slot underneath the streaming box’s HDMI connector. If you have an HDMI cable plugged in, the cable’s connector shell covers the slot and makes it invisible. Is this a problem? The number of messages left on message boards by people asking for help in locating this slot says it’s a problem that would have easily been solved with a label near the slot that says “microSD card,” or “insert microSD here,” or “dig here,” or some other helpful phrase that indicates where the slot is hidden.

Second, I recalled that the Roku 3 has definite limits with respect to the microSD card’s storage capacity. Again, looking at the Roku message boards, I can see that the Roku 3 has definite problems with respect to the microSD slot and seems balky a lot of the time. People on these message boards who are trying to help suggest many solutions:

Format or reformat the microSD card using the Roku 3
Buy a smaller microSD card
Buy a different brand of microSD card
SanDisk microSD cards don’t work
Pop the microSD card in and out until it works

Some of these suggestions might be anecdotal, but they all represented user experiences. I found one comment that seemed to encapsulate everything:

“My 2 Roku 3s 4230s constantly give me messages ‘a microsd card is now recommended.’ I have tried 2 different SanDisk cards, both 32gb, one ultra then I got a sdhc. Neither will detect. I have reinserted multiple times. I found many complaints of this problem on the internet, most tried multiple types/brands of cards trying to find one that works. I don’t want to buy any more. Am I wasting my time or is there a fix? Appreciate any help.

“After reading many comments in this section I had just about decided my 32 GB card was too large and that I needed to return it and get 8 GB instead. However, one tiny remark solved my problem. All I needed to do was use my thumbnail to finish inserting the card. It only fits in one way and it slides in easily the correct way. I had taken it out and re-inserted it several times and never got the format message. This time I simply pushed it farther in with my fingernail and my 32 GB card is working great. Thank you to all who posted your solutions. Such a tiny issue can cause such frustration and gobbles up way too much time.”

There’s a justifiable reason why microSD card capacity could be an issue. SanDisk, Panasonic, and Toshiba jointly announced the SD card standard in 1999. It has a 2Gbyte capacity limit. The microSD standard appeared in 2004 but wasn’t named microSD until 2005, just to confuse things a bit. The SDHC card standard, introduced in 2006, expanded card capacity to 32Gbytes. The SDXC standard, introduced in 2009, expanded capacity to 2Tbytes and SDUC, introduced in 2018, again expanded capacity to 128Tbytes. Any product designed during this evolution might be backward compatible but certainly can’t be forward compatible. Roku announced the Roku 3 streaming media box in 2013, so it might have been designed to support the SDXC standard, but clearly it wasn’t. It supports the SDHC standard and cannot accommodate a microSD card larger than 32Gbytes.

My first step was to go out and buy a microSD card. You can order all the microSD cards you want online, but I had only the weekend, so I needed a local source. A decade ago, buying an older microSD card was a trivial task in Silicon Valley, even on a weekend. I’d simply go to the nearest Fry’s Electronics and get a card, likely at a closeout price. However, Fry’s closed all its stores in 2021, having filed Chapter 11 on February 24 of that year. Micro Center, another go-to place located off 101 in the Mercado Shopping Center, closed years before that. (The company seems to be returning to Santa Clara this year to a Stevens Creek location.) You can get microSD cards at Target or Best Buy, but I suspected they’d no longer have smaller microSD cards in stock, and a quick online check confirmed my suspicions.

That left an old, reliable source: Central Computer on Stevens Creek Blvd. I’d not visited there for more than a decade. My daughter, who went with me, had never heard of it. It’s a computer builder’s dream store and harkens back to earlier days in Silicon Valley. When we entered, my daughter looked around and said that it was clearly my kind of place, and indeed it was. The only change to the store from decades past was that the microSD cards were now in a locked case that the cashier needed to unlock for us. The smallest available microSD card at Central computer was a 32Gbyte, Class 10 SanDisk Ultra microSDHC UHS-I card. It cost $8.99. We were in and out of Central Computer in five minutes.

Returning to my daughter’s apartment, I plugged the microSD card into the Roku 3 box and powered it up. It did not recognize the card, which I confirmed by going into the Roku’s system setup menu. Recalling the various suggestions that I’d read online, including the one quoted above, I unplugged and replugged the microSD card several times. The Roku 3 box recognized the card on the fifth try. I formatted the card using the setup menu, and the Roku 3’s performance instantly improved. The streaming media box was usable once again. I’m not sure why it took five tries to get the Roku 3 to recognize this microSD card. Dirt in the microSD socket, perhaps?

We can draw some design conclusions from this adventure. First, the Roku 3 was inconsistent when requesting a memory upgrade. Instead, my daughter experienced degrading performance and system lockups without understanding the cause. I never saw the request for a memory card while I stayed with her. Second, lack of signage has caused many Roku customers to waste a lot of time looking for the microSD slot in their Roku 3 boxes. An on-screen graphic and silkscreened sign would go a long way to improving the user experience. Finally, I’m not sure what to say about the need to reinsert the card several times before the Roku 3 box recognized the card. It’s an old unit. It could just be dirt. But more than a few Roku owners have seen similar behavior, so this is not an uncommon problem. All of these issues should tickle your brain next time you design a new product.