Have you ever felt like your phone was secretly plotting against you? That’s exactly how I felt when, on 5th September, my trusty Redmi Note 8 Pro started lagging every time I clicked pictures. It wasn’t just a little delay—something was seriously wrong. No matter what I tried, the issue persisted. And believe me, I tried everything.

I uninstalled WhatsApp, cleared the gallery cache, and even wiped other apps, hoping to solve the problem. But each time, it came back—slow, frustrating, and causing endless headaches for both me and everyone around me. Imagine the frustration when you're trying to capture a moment, and your camera takes forever!

The Culprit I Didn’t Expect

After almost a month of this nonsense, the idea of buying a new phone started creeping into my mind. Could it be a hardware issue? Should I head to the service center? Maybe it was time to unlock the bootloader and start fresh. But none of these thoughts felt right. It couldn’t be that serious, could it?

Then came the night of 6th October. Tired and out of ideas, I was almost ready to give up and reset everything. But before going nuclear, I thought, “What if I just remove the SD card and SIM card first?” You know, just to rule it out. It felt like a long shot.

And to my surprise—it worked.

The SD Card from Hell

Turns out, the SD card, the one I trusted with my life (well, my data), was the real troublemaker. I was using an HP SD card with a 10-year warranty—seemed reliable enough, right? Except, recently, hundreds of users have been facing issues with data corruption, and I had unknowingly joined the unlucky club.

I could see the files on the SD card in my phone’s file explorer, so I never suspected it. But when I finally clicked on them, I realized the truth. The SD card was corrupt, and it had some bad sectors. No wonder my phone was behaving so strangely—it was trying to read from a broken source!

Relief (and a Bit of Regret)

Thankfully, I had backed up my data up to July onto my hard drive. So, while I lost some things, I hadn’t lost everything. The thought of losing WhatsApp messages and having to uninstall apps was painful, but at least I hadn’t lost all my memories and important files.

The moment I cleared the gallery cache and waited for it to rebuild, everything started to click (literally and figuratively). My phone was back to normal. It had been a long, confusing journey, but the culprit was finally caught: the SD card.