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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:

  1. Press [Win]+X then select Device Manager.
  2. Expand Universal Serial Bus Controller, right-click on the RealTek USB 3.0 Card Reader driver, then select Update Driver Software.
  3. From the pop-up, select Browse my computer for driver software.
  4. On the next screen, select Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.
  5. Make sure Show compatible hardware is selected, then click on USB Mass Storage Device, then click Next.
  6. It should say that Windows has successfully updated your driver software, so you can now click Close.
  7. 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.

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