The Pandorian's guide to SD cards [updated]
November 6, 2009
Today we turn our attention to the one Pandora accessory we’ll all be buying: flash memory. SD cards are a part of the landscape these days; you know a piece of tech has gone mainstream when it’s available at the supermarket. But like all mass-adopted technology, this simple, universal appeal can mask a *cough* Pandora’s Box of product variants and pitfalls. This article aims to help you get the most out of your Pandora’s SD slots, and hopefully avoid getting burned along the way.
One card or two?
It should be mentioned that you don’t actually need an SD card to make Pandora work. The operating system lives on the internal NAND memory, so it’ll boot up and run without a card inserted. The NAND is effectively off limits for new apps and data though, so if you want to install stuff it’s BYO memory, baby. You can get by just fine with a single SD card if you have to, but a pair of cards offers more flexibility. You might have a card in slot 1 for your everyday apps, using slot 2 to load up different TV shows or console collections. You might run Ubuntu from slot 1, then load up slot 2 with some satnav software and map packs. You might… have the idea by now.
Selecting the right size
There’s only one rule here: Go as big as your budget allows. A cheap 2GB card can go surprisingly far if you need it to, as long as you’re selective about what you put on it. If you want a substantial variety of gaming with a bit of media on the side, you’ll have no trouble filling an 8GB card. If you can’t leave the house without an entire season of BSG on your person, you’ll be wanting a 16GB card at the least. Pandora supports up to 32GB per slot, if your wallet is up for it.
Selecting a speed class
Most SD cards are labelled with a speed class, represented by a number inside a partial circle. These numbers indicate the minimum write speed of the card. The most common speed classes are 2, 4, or 6, indicating write speeds of 2MB/sec, 4MB/sec and 6MB/sec respectively. Class 10 cards can now be found on the market too. These figures alone won’t tell you how well a card will perform though; we also need to know the read speed. The read speed for a given card will generally be much higher than the write speed, and if listed on the card, will be given as a multiplier (like a CD ROM drive). As an example, a recently purchased Verbatim “Premium” Class 6 16GB SDHC lists a write speed of 40x (6MB/sec), and a read speed of 133x (20MB/sec).
Read speeds will vary between brands of course, even within a given speed class. Adding to the fun, different manufacturers use different buzzwords and terminology, which can make finding the right card a little exhausting. If you’re worn down by all the fine print and you just want a damned card, you can still use speed class ratings as a rough guide to performance (even though the speed class only indicates write speed). A class 2 card (2MB/sec write speed) is likely to have a fairly low read speed too, so it may struggle with video or demanding games, giving you glitchy or stuttered output. A class 4 card will usually have higher read speeds than a class 2, and should be fine for anything Pandora can throw at it. A class 6 card will offer enough extra oomph to take the worry out of your purchase.
Thanks to all the commenters who helped expand this section. If you’d like to read more, it’s just as confusing on Wikipedia.SDXC
SDXC is the emerging SD standard that will eventually supersede SDHC (in the same way that Bluray is superseding DVD… very slowly, and not really). Tech talk in the forums suggests that a future firmware update could, in theory, allow Pandora to support the higher storage capacity of SDXC, if not the higher speeds. Theory is all it is though; there is certainly no official support for SDXC in the pipeline.
How should you format your SD cards?
The short answer is, you don’t really need to do anything. New SD cards will be FAT formatted and ready to rock Windows, OSX, or Linux right out of the box. FAT has its detractors though, and its limitations too (like the file size cap of 4GB). FAT detractors will argue that an open file system like Ext2 is technically superior, and their arguments will be valid. But the bottom line is, if you’ve never thought about file systems before, there’s no pressure on you to start thinking about them now. Just plug it in.
Note: OSX users should avoid the Ext2 file system. As Craig discovered back in July, OSX and Ext* don’t play well together. Windows users wishing to dabble in Ext2 need to Ext-enable their system with this free utility.The SD buyer’s safety guide. Beware of fakes!
A good portion of readers won’t have learned anything new from this article so far. That’s ok, no offence taken. But this is the section everyone needs to read. You’ve probably heard the occasional anecdote about dodgy SD cards or USB drives being sold on eBay. Unfortunately these incidents aren’t so occasional; the market is awash with legions of dodgy sellers and counterfeit products. If you’ve ever seen “bargain” flash memory for sale, chances are it was fake. Now, shifting market prices are compounding the problem. Forum member Prometheus is our resident expert on the topic.
“I have become aware lately (both via SOSFakeFlash and my own observations) that flash media prices are mostly going up, not down as many seem to think they are … the increasing prices coupled with the misconception of falling costs could potentially increase the numbers of people duped.”
Flashchiptutor (part of the SOSFakeFlash group of sites) posted the following guide to average flash costs back in April of this year:
1GB = 3.38 USD
2GB = 4.11 USD
4GB = 6.61 USD
8GB = 13.23 USD
16GB = 29.41 USD
By September, these prices had indeed gone up. Not down!
2GB = 5.17 USD
4GB = 7.31 USD
The golden rule of flash memory, it seems, is that there is no such thing as a bargain. Manufacturing prices have gone as low as they can, and profit margins are slim. If you see an 8GB card at a 4GB price, chances are you’re looking at a 4GB card with a fake label. A card that, given time, will probably eat all your files. So the solution is just to buy SD cards with “normal” prices, right? Sadly, no. The fakers are onto this too, with some sellers now asking market prices for their fake cards in order to look credible.
Thankfully, buying SD cards without getting burned is actually pretty easy. Stick to reputable retailers, known brands, and pay retail price. Buying online can save you a few bucks, but ask around first if you’re not sure about the site. Avoid eBay at all costs. There are some trusted sellers there, but unless you know who they are, it’s not worth the gamble.
SOSFakeFlash | Flash drives 101 | Flash drives 102 | The real cost of flash | Detecting fakes
Special thanks to Prometheus for making this article happen! SD photo borrowed from this guy.
For europeans:
Amazon.de ships pretty much anywhere
59€ for 32GB SDHC Class6
Best price i could find…
A very important post, Gruso – one that I hope everyone interested in the Pandora eventually reads. I’ve been the victim of fake memory cards myself, and so I wish others to bare awareness that these dangers exist, and that it’s very easy to be fooled.
Good introduction article. I think there are two points that it might be helpful to mention about choosing a SDHC card for the Pandora that could be included in the summary: read speeds and IO operations per second (and I guess potentially access time).
The class rating of a SHDC card only reflects write speeds, so the read speed is left unstated. On some generic cards the read speed can be poor. Buy carefully!
The IO operations per second (and access time) are interesting to us precisely because of one of the features of the Pandora – and that is running an OS off a SDHC card. Let’s face it most SDHC (certainly anything class 4 or higher) cards should have no problem keeping up with the write speed of the Pandora, but the access time and IO differences will make a difference when you’re running an OS off a card.
It would be nice to know the Pandora’s max read/write speeds though!
I can see people choosing a fast (read/write/IO/access) card to run their OS from (if they choose not to use the NAND based default one) and a larger less peformant card as storage (video/music/ROMs/games/ISOs etc). This ability to provide what is effectively a tiered storage model is a great option to have and is courtesy of the OP team providing NAND and 2 SDHC slots
Nice article. This is precisely the information you need in order to make a wise choice. No need for googlin.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820178197&cm_re=pny_16_gb-_-20-178-197-_-Product
I bought two of those a while back on preparation for the Pandora. One of the best deals I could find at the time- plus a trusted site and brand name.
I’ve been looking at this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220254
lol, i got my main 16GB SD card for christmas last year – oh how naive i was! At least this year I can get another one and have a chance of using the thing sometime soon!
Thanks for this!
What class are the OpenPandora 32GB cards? does anyone know? could do with finding out so I can cancel my order if it’s a class 2
Well, the section about the speed class is a little short. Some cards provides a much higher transfer speed that 6MB/s in which cases they market some kind of “x” speed, much like for CD-ROM players. Additionally, read and write rates can be substantially different…
So, all in all, it’s just very hard to find really fast SD cards. Class 6 is just some “warranty” that the card is not dead slow, but by no mean necessarily fast.
By the way, do you people know the maximum transfer rate that can achieve the Pandora’s card readers?
The Sandisk Ultra II SD card I have in this machine at the moment is advertised at writing at 15MB/s and guaranteed to have a sustained read and write speed in excess of 9MB/s – yet they’re only marked as being class 2.
I’ve used hundreds of different makes of flash card in my job, but Sandisk is the only brand I trust with my own data. There’s a distinct premium to Sandisk products though.
Thanks for the input Kmob and JamesPond, I’ll look at expanding the speed section.
Thanks Gruso as infocational as ever.
Please update it with this info: One of the best windows tools you can use to test a SD card is the h2testw tool from CT magazine. Which you can find here ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/h2testw_1.4.zip . It has a english and german interface and is very simple to use. It simply writes out files to the SD card until the card is full, does a checksum on the files created (to detect bad sectors or to detect cards who say they are 8gb but are only 2 or 4 gb) and measures the speed of the SD card.
Note that the tool will almost always say something like “warning testing only xxxxxMB while total capacity is xxxxMB, there fore…” (the last number will be a few MB more). This is normal and a result of formatting , the difference should only be a few MB.
Would it be possible to stream video from an wifi connect media?
For any Australians floating around, if you don’t know already, there is a retailer in pretty much every city called “MSY”, service is good, if you don’t mind people with a questionable grasp of English, but the prices are insanely awesome. You don’t get to browse in MSY though, so you better check their website and know what you want before you step in the door. Their website looks like it was made in MS Word, because it was. They don’t give a f-ck about anything but getting the tech to you at the lowest price.
Having said that, a bit about brands of SD cards….
The big names are Kingston, SanDisk, Apacer, and the newest entry, Toshiba.
Sony make flash, but it’s sh-t, don’t ever buy Sony flash memory, it’s expensive and very very slow. They are simply not innovating, they thing “We’re Sony, we invented the 3.5″ floppy, the DVD, BluRay, UMB, MicroDisk, blah blah blah” and it’s all sh-t. They didn’t invent DVD, they helped out (along with a bunch of companies). The last worth while contribution Sony made to storage was the 3.5″ floppy disk, and that was 30 years ago. They think they can rest on their laurels, and people do still keep lining up to get ass-raped by them.
SanDisk is the “big name” maker, and are one to be very wary of. SanDisk always costs more than other brands, cheap SanDisk flash is a lot slower than generic brand, expensive SanDisk flash is very nice and fast, but with retailers generally treating them as “brand name”, usually all SanDisk flash is expensive, with retailers not differentiating between the good and bad. I don’t like them because they put Malware on their “Cruizer” line of USB Flash sticks, but other than that, they’re reliable.
Kingston is the “budget” brand, don’t get me wrong, it is still a reputable brand though. They’ve been around since Adam was a boy, and you can’t go wrong with them. It’s not wicked fast, but it’s not slow, and it’s always cheap. You can’t go wrong with Kingston, but it’s not exactly high performance.
Apacer is a smaller one, and the few bits of Apacer flash I have are quite fast. Your mileage will vary. They are not known too well in my parts.
The latest entry, and quite surprising too, is Toshiba. It costs a little bit more, but there’s a good reason for that. It’s FAAAAAAAAAAAST!!!! Toshiba’s only been selling branded flash in the past 6 months in my area, and damn it’s good stuff. I haven’t seen Toshy flash slower than 20Mb/s read (usually 6-10Mb write).
There is also Corsair, which are so over priced it’s actually quite funny. It is always fast, Corsair don’t do slow, but they don’t do cheap, heck they don’t even do reasonably priced. Toshy is as fast, and sometimes half the price of Corsair. But if you gotta have the shiniest of bling, you can’t go past Corsair. Just remember the more savvy people will be laughing behind your back.
I’ve got to emphasise the part about dodgy flash out there, eBay is simply asking to have someone take your money and give you nothing. I have never seen flash come from eBay that was either as fast as claimed, or as big as claimed.
As fakes are becoming common, most manufacturers are putting little “Genuine” holograms on their packaging. But the fakes can do these holograms too. The simple rule of thumb is this… find a shop you trust, so if it is fake, you can take it back. It is a criminal offense to sell a defective product and not offer a refund when you come back within a couple of days. Every retailer I’ve seen will jump at the opportunity to replace the product, give you a different brand (adjusting for price… nothing for free), or give a refund. If you have to harass them to get this basic legal right, find another retailer. Most importantly though, be polite when you do. They didn’t know the product was defective, and you can rest assured they will be taking it up with their supplier. And they will be just as aggresive towards them as you feel like being now. Except their supplier isn’t being paid minimum wage, and the shop attendant infront of you is, so don’t piss them off. They’ve had a hard enough day already
I should point out, that until Toshiba entered the arena, Corsair was the undisputed kings of speed. There was simply nothing that came close to them in performance. They have that reputation, so expect to pay for it.
Indeed. It’s the Soup Nazi of tech stores.
How about PQI? My 16GB card worked well with my GP2X. Also, my Transcend card seems to work reasonably well with my camera.
I only play with the flash my local MSY stocks :-p
Put reviews of anything I’ve missed up. I’m very interested. A good trick is to get yourself Supercopier…
http://supercopier.sfxteam.org/
…and post what speed it writes and reads at, and as much info as you can about the card. Also a general overview of the manufacturer would be nice
Many thanks for putting this up, Gruso – a useful resource it is.
@polossatik – H2Testw is already linked to in the article (see the link labelled “Detecting fakes”).
It’s SOSFakeFlash’s piece on it, but it is there.
(Also, yay, this is my first ever comment on the community blog.
)
Come back soon. You’re always welcome.
And Thanks for your part of this blog.
hum yes, it’s there mentioned, but h2testw is so much the first step you should do when getting flash memory that I would mention it explicit (and then maybe refer to the other – quite crowdy – site.
I disagree with your assessment of class 2 cards. 2MB is fast enough to rip an entire single sided DVD in 45 minutes. Painfully slow while you wait for it to finish, but assuming the read speed is the same as the write speed, it will have no problems playing back that same DVD dump in the 2 hours (or whatever) that the movie is. Music is generally recorded in MB per minute, not second, so not even close to hitting the minimum. PSX had a 2x CD ROM drive, 300 KB/s, so you should also be good there.
No, playing back from a “slow” card usually isn’t the problem. The problem is when you want to copy things onto and off of that card. Waiting 45 minutes to copy a one hour movie seems like a very ineffective use of time.
Besides copy, it also does a big difference if the card is holding the OS or, in general, executable files.
A faster SD card would help the OS to feel less sluggish, and to fasten your load times of games and other applications.
You’re right, however, in stating that if the only purpose is movie watching or music listening, then a “good enough” speed is perfect, more speed is not useful. While in other cases, the more speed the better. Always, unless of course the speed of the card outruns the speed of the card reader!
Hence my previous question: does anybody know the maximum speed of the Pandora’s card reader???
I have 2 16gb sdhc cards waiting for the pandora since last november. Hopefully hot plugging is seemless.
When the Pandora is out, won’t teeny little 32/16GB cards be worth pennies?
I’ve got an 8Gb Class 6 (transend – must fake test this) card lined up. I have 2x4Gb cards I am using with my Gp2x – mostly all my programs are on one of these so I figure I would need much more than 8Gb. After all, Bill Gates once said something about no-one will ever need more than 64kb memory and he wasn’t wrong.
I will want to play with ubuntu (my karmic install hangs the desktop EVERY time at the moment – don’t upgrade yet!) Anyone know if 4Gb is big enough?
Picked up a 32 GB card from the local Micro-Center store a few months back, I plan on picking up a second when the Pandora ships. I had to stop and check the speed class reading this article, thankfully it’s a 4.
I’m glad you put this article out there Gruso, It’s great information that save us all a lot of anguish either in fruitless advert-ridden research attempts, or in Hindsight-itis that happens after we get bad cards.
Many many thanks.
I’m sure we do not want a flood of these in this blog but just for interest here are the results from h2testw for my 8Gb Transcend Class 6 SDHC (7dayshop and Amazon)
Warning: Only 7620 of 7638 MByte tested.
Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 7.98 MByte/s
Reading speed: 8.62 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4
Not a fake and class 8 speeds.
I’m happy.
I had some files on the card BTW.
Also thinking 8Mb/s is not all that fast. Not the 133x 20Mb/s claimed by other cards.
I picked up 3 Extreme III Sandisks last black friday (8gb) for $5 each, shipped, after rebate. I lost one of them but I’m going to use the other two in my Pandora. Just tested the speeds and I got
Writing speed: 17.1 MByte/s
Reading speed: 19.5 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4
So I guess they’re not lying about them being extremely fast. They had an even faster version but I didn’t want to pay the extra for it.
That deal is something y’all might want to look into if you’re in the U.S. Beach Camera usually does it (they did 4gb for the same price for Black Friday 2007). It’s an online order, super easy if you can get your order through. No waiting in lines.
git!
I might write an article about filesystems for cards later.
Thanks for posting this gruso. It’s nice to see all the stuff on the forums collaborated in a streamlined article.
I refuse to read this article.
I will not regret purchasing these two shitty SD cards for my Pandora.
topic “microSD/miniSD –> SD slot, via adapter” is not covered. Is it slower or not? Some pitfalls?
There is no difference, except for price & size.
Any “Class 6″ SD card meets the minimum requirements, be it MicroSD, MiniSD or regular SD.
Having said that, I am yet to be made aware of a single manufacturer who specifies the actual speed of their cards on the packaging or release materials, so it still rests on “How fast does it actually go in the real world?”
Your benchmarks conducted using a MicroSD -> SD adapter on a PC will be exactly the same as the results you obtain on a Pandora, speed limits of the Pandora not-withstanding.
Adapters do not slow anything down, as you will note MicroSD and MiniSD have the same number of pins as a regular SD card, and indeed the adapters are nothing more than bits of plastic that make the pins fit into the larger slot.
This information is only based on the adapters I have seen, which all came with the cards in question, and you may have the adapter that is the exception to the rule I just dictated.
Erk, actually checked my cards… MicroSD has one less pin (my guess is the extra pin is the “Copy Protection pin”), and MiniSD has 2 extra pins, of which I am unsure about their purpose.
I think it is a safe bet that as all of the cards I have that are not SD come with an adapter, because there is no intelligence in the adapter, and they as such cost almost nothing to make. Therefore the adapter will have no performance impact.
Kudos to you Gruso, you do an invaluable job
A word of advice when formatting SD Cards to something other than fat and then back to fat.
As long as you have access to a windows computer you should use the formatting software available (free of charge) from http://www.sdcard.org for better compatibility and write performance (my own tests have shown write speed increases from 5% to 80% depending on models and brands compared to linux mkdosfs, read performance is not affected)
Seb64 took your advice. Downloaded the format tool and did a full format (no erase). The whole of the card was tested this time…
Writing speed: 8.34 MByte/s
Reading speed: 8.90 MByte/s
Which is a little better than it was before..
Writing speed: 7.98 MByte/s
Reading speed: 8.62 MByte/s
This is a newish card so if you’ve played with formatting or have a heavily used card then may be the improvement would be greater.
These numbers are close enough as to be statistically irrelevant.
Benchmarks of media always fluctuate approximately 10% either way. It is the very nature of a multitasking OS, you can never be sure that what happened actually happened as fast as it possibly could.
The only method to obtain infallible benchmarks is to do the testing under DOS, (or any other non-multitasking OS) or alternatively to conduct several tests (at least 10 under each test condition).
Fair enough. Valid point.
Very nice article, even for the person looking for general SD card answers.
It might be helpful to note that generally, at this time, the highest capacity per dollar goes to 8GB and 16GB cards, and it’s not hard to find class 4 and up and still get it cheaper per gigabyte capacity than other sizes.
If 8GB and 16GB are the same cost per gigabyte, consider the larger size unless you know you can do your thing with 8GB or less. It wouldn’t make sense to get less than 8GB unless you can’t afford $15, or you find some deals on smaller sizes so good that it’d be worth your inconvenience to swap cards in and out.
As far as I can remember 16GB has been the sweet spot since maybe last spring, which probably won’t change until 64GB or more comes out, which won’t be for a good long while yet. While I’d like to get two 32GB myself, I can be fine with one 16GB until the 32GB becomes the new sweet spot, at which time I intend to move the 16GB to a camera that could use it.
Then again, if SDXC rumors pan out, I might even hold out for bigger. The real question is, how much can you actually use? Remember also that the Pandora can take usb flash drives and hard drives, so there’s always those for huge storage jobs like tv episodes.
—
Keep an eye on Black Friday and Christmas holiday season deals, but don’t be surprised if demand (from all the new SD-taking camera, etc. purchases) actually drives prices a bit higher until January, which might be the time Pandora arrives.
Then again, if you keep an eye out for bargains anyway, no problem buying when the price is right for you. Like gruso says, buy as much as you can *afford*, but keep in mind that you might want to buy as *much* as you can afford too.
So, who hasn’t used the auto-notify feature of slickdeals.net yet to let them know when any post mentions sd, sdhc, or whatever other keyword?
And I live in Southern California, so I’m looking at newegg.com, mwave.com, and possibly geeks.com for my reputable online sellers that also happen to ship from the area.
Who’s ready to buy this big boy?
http://www.amazon.com/32GB-Extreme-Secure-Digital-Capacity/dp/B001TDL34Y/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1257549086&sr=8-16
If mdadm will run on ARM, it should be possible to boot an OS from a disk array striped (raid0) across both SDHC slots.
Indeed, one could also use lvm2 to do this, so mdadm isn’t even required.
Note that raid0 probably won’t give you the benefits your looking for. With no seek time, and a limited bus, you won’t see any speed boost like you would from a regular hard drive.
I suppose if the idea is to just create one big disk, you can do that. Seems kind of silly of an idea to me though, because then you’re locked into using both slots at the same time and can’t hot-swap one if needed.
if you’re in the UK look at this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-47265-32GB-Class-Video/dp/B002HHLGTI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1257594870&sr=8-1
from AMAZON and not another seller.
1 question though…you see the cards that say “for camcorders” “digital cameras” etc…can you still you those or would there be a problem?
One of my cards is branded as being ‘for video’ but it behaves just like any normal SD card in practice. Just a marketing gimmick as far as I can tell.
Anyone have any luck with TopRam brand flash memory? i just got a 32gb card off ebay…. seems like it may be the ripoff variety
TopRam makes good microSD cards.. I don’t know about SD though.
WTF is a Pandori? Sounds like a japanese delicacy
Something else to keep in mind, Windows formatting can kill SD/HC cards. If you’re going to format via Windows, download Panasonic’s “SD Formatter” tool, to be safe.
True. I am just using it on a eeepc 701 under windows xp but it has some problems that I guess are sdcard related.
I used eeectl (overclock tool) to lower my backlight and overclock the cpu, and for some reason I don’t have problems with the sd-card anymore.
I read somewhere that some sd-cards brands can read/write without problems on 2.7V and some brands start at 3.3V.
Maybe a pandora will also benefit from those lower voltage sdcards.
Hummm… The EeePC 701 is well-known for having a buggy SD card reader. Firmware’s fault or something like that. So it may not be the best example of problems with SD cards…
HP’s USB Disk Storage Format Tool formats FAT volumes above 4gb. Worked great with my 500gb HDD.
First I’d like to say thanks to Gruso. This man is doing an awesome job of keep our minds off the real topic we all dwell on constantly — when we will get our Pandoras? The SDram article was extremely informative and I will use it as a guide to buy sdcards, after I get the Pandora. Yknow, the price very well might come down on the memory between now and two months from now
But seriously, the wait is killing me and we’re sooooo close. Please don’t tell us there will be delays because of the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays here in the United States. That’s one triple-play I seriously want to avoid!
Here’s something to ponder and shouldn’t be too hard to do: Get the Sprint / Franklin U300 USB 4G celluar modem working with Debian or Ubuntu on the Pandora. Then you can play network Quake (I love the nail gun!) just about anywhere (in the near future — I already have 4G here in Chicago) with under 100ms of latency.
Gruic
I ask officially and they tell me they are expecting to release it this month.
… they expecting …
But it certainly won’t happen !
It’s easy to understand, they don’t even have half of every final pieces in their hand so how on hell 20 days will make differences ?
No seriously, better plan on january.
Before finalizing a product there are always small problems.
If you think about when they said being soooo close, you’ll see that several weeks (if not months) have elapsed in the meantime.
In any case I remember that twice already, Christmas was the deadline…
Nobody likes waiting.
I’ve always been curious about something with flash memory:
When I look at the partition layout in gparted, the device has a few MB (2-4 from what I’ve seen) of unallocated space in the beginning of the drive. What’s the purpose of this? I’ve never had any problems when I’ve redone the partitioning on them to use the whole space.
I always thought flash memory kept a few ‘sectors’/ MB back to replace any developing faulty ones (?)
any time I’ve seen mention of this, it says the firmware itself saves those areas and does not report them as available (so even gparted wouldn’t see them)
this reminded me of something though, I remember some cards I had would register bad sectors in windows chkdsk if I did a “surface scan” though I would never have problems retrieving files from them even when full…
This is a FAT specific thing, in order to stay compatible with older OSes (MS-DOS) and with some devices (none come to mind) FAT partitions have to start on cylinder boundaries.
Newer OSes (i.e. everything since FAT32 came around) don’t mind partitions that start in the midle of a cylinder and as such do not have to lose space after the partition table.
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/45539-shipping-date-guessing-game/page__view__findpost__p__771675
Lol
So much wrong guessing !
Were we so near from a release at the time?
Keep going on ! Like lottery things shall happen (hope so).
I suppose they get others troubles since the last 3 days.
sad and funny at the same time.
The 1GB SD I’ve always used with my GP2X always had some troubles when I filled it. Now I tested it with H2testw and there is 255.9 MByte OK and the rest is DATA LOST. Looks like I’ve got counterfeit stuff.
Now is there a way to format it as a 256MB card to be sure I don’t step outside the real memory and corrupt the rest? The few formatting utilities I know can’t allow changing of the size. Or should i use a partitioning utility ?