Can someone tell me the max capacity XDAII can take for SD card? Can I put either a 512 or 1G card in?
Thanks
Both is possible.
AFAIK there is no limit for SD-cards
FWIW, I'm using a 512MB Panasonic SD card and it seems to be OK.
HTH
since the sd card uses FAT16, I think that the limit would be something like 4GB.
but also I think that it should be possible to format a sdcard with multiple partitions.
just tried, under xp, it is also possible to format an sd card as fat32, the xda will read it too.
format DRIVELETTER: /fs:fat32
in that case the maximum size is 32GB.
Thanks!!!!!! All very useful information... Didn't know that you could specify the format.
At the moment, I find 256mb the most economical, although 512mb are only just slightly more expensive than two 256 cards. 1gb cards though are nearly 3 times the cost of 512 ones.
They are small and easily swapped over, and you can fit a lot on a 256 mb card. I can't see any point in buying a 1gb card until the price drops substantially.
That what I thought initially, but because I could get this 1GB card at a really cheap price, well less than £100 each ;-)
Where can u get a 1gb SD card for less than £100 - pls provide a link
i bought a new 8gb sd card and im going to run pancake rom. ive done a bit of searching and i see alot of different answers when it comes to how much ext2 & swap space to use. what do you guys think is the best for ultimate performance on the hero?
i want to split the card for:
swap
ext2
fat32
the defaults in recovery should be fine, I believe it is 64 swap 256 ext then the rest fat. there isn't a reason to change the defaults really as far as I know it shouldn't change the performance for the better. but for the worse.
well i set 64mb for swap and 1gb for ext2 and the rest for fat. seems to be working well.
1 gig for apps seems like a lot of apps....
thedudejdog said:
1 gig for apps seems like a lot of apps....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yeah i know but i may end up with alot of them, you never know.
Swap: 64mb
EXT2: 1024MB
The Rest is FAT32
This is with a Class 6 8GB SDHC.
No idea why but when I have a 1gig ext2 the phone seems to go much faster than say a 256mb or even 512mb partition. You can symlink alot of stuff to the ext2. I only use it for cache and apps though.
I purchased a Kingston 16 GB class 10 microsd card for my Nexus One. I set up a 1 GB ext3 partition and the rest was fat32. When I tested the performace of the card its read performance was within specifications but its write performance was only about 3 mb/s. I corresponded with Kingston support and they sent me a new one. The new one performed much better but would not work long before it generated so many errors the phone would hang. After I described my configuration to Kingston here is the reply from their technical support.
Hello Lynn,
We do not support any of our flash cards as boot disks or to use to run an OS. These cards are meant to be used in cameras, smartphones, etc as storage devices. It is designed to have a single partition. We suggest you return this card for a refund. If you cannot return this to your place of purchase, please provide a copy of your receipt to see if we can provide a refund for you.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to reply to this e-mail with full email history. Thank you for using Kingston on-line technical support.
Regards,
Glenn Neumeister
Kingston Technology
Technical Support
8am - 5pm Monday through Friday PST
Sparky19 said:
We do not support any of our flash cards as boot disks or to use to run an OS.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just means they do not provide support. I have used them in the past and they worked fine
I'm using the same card and its working fine for me
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App
I have that card too and originally let my Nexus format it. I had write performance of about 700 KB/s - 1.3 MB/s. Awful. Then I formatted it again on Windows with a bigger size of blocks. IIRC, the ideal I found for top speeds was 16 KBytes blocks. Anything higher and it'd slowly go down, anything lower and I had crippled speed. I think it has to do with the size of memory pages on that card.
I have that card and I use it with both a fat and ext3 partition no problem. It is quite slow though (they call this class 10?).
Title != Problem. Fix it.
And most likely what you're experiencing is filesystem format type (block size, clusters, etc) AND block alignment. You'll have to google for the details, but if the card has a 4K physical block size, you'll want the blocks to be 4k and start at the start of each. Otherwise to write 4k you write TWO blocks on the card.
Same deal with SSD's. Partitioning and formatting has be optimized for them to perform their best.
To All,
I did a bit of testing on Micro SD cards All claimed they were class 10 in other words they should (as claimed by the manufacturers) to read and write 10 mb per sec
The Reality is the only one that really hit that mark was the Wintec which also was cheap)
I used two of the sd card testers from the app store. One called sd card tester the other was ssd card tester (one was free one cost a buck)
I did the tests using various buffer size (2, 4 and 8 mb) did it 3 times and averaged. This is not scientific but it did show that there is alot of misrepresentation going on...........
The findings are as follows
Wintec averaged 9.3 write and 12.5 down
Patriot 7.8 write and 10 read
king max 7mb write and 8.2 read
Kingston 6 write and 8 read (what a dog)
None could really reach the 10 write threshold consistently. So, basically what I would recommend is read up and do your research and watch out for false review claims from the manufacturers.
I am now using the Wintec 16 gig and it does improve the response of the phone when writing or reading from the sd card. But this nothing compared to the awesome custom roms found in our dev forum. There is where the speed resides
It was fun doing this hope this helps some .........
That is weird because I have the Kingston 16gb Class 10 microsd card and I transferred my avatar movie at 11-12mb/s.
I found out that if you format the card through the phone, the speeds are slow. But if you format the card through windows, that card is fast.
mdkxtreme said:
That is weird because I have the Kingston 16gb Class 10 microsd card and I transferred my avatar movie at 11-12mb/s.
I found out that if you format the card through the phone, the speeds are slow. But if you format the card through windows, that card is fast.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
probably a file system difference. formatting in windows will make it ntfs, formatting on the phone will format it to...? rfs? fat32?
No I didn't format it in NTFS. I formatted to FAT32.
Ntfs has better perdormance than fat, anyways, so I dunno what he means by that.
Its cause the cards are low qual. Kingstons inclided. There was a huge article by someone on the internet about them (not directly the speeds, though).
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
N8ter said:
Ntfs has better perdormance than fat, anyways, so I dunno what he means by that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
that was my point, that if you formatted it ntfs in windows it would perform better than the phone's formatting (which is probably fat32). but looking into it, i don't think android supports ntfs.
Like I said guys, I formatted in FAT32 and it outperformed the phone's formatting scheme. I didn't know I could format it in NTFS because I didn't know if it would work or not so I formatted in FAT32
yea NTFS wont work on android
Formatting on the phone is standard fat is all it recognizes it is possible if you are on 4ext instead of 2e (stock like my phone) then you could get better speeds. The problem as one of you stated is the low quality control, all these cards rarely get the stated speeds.
Yea, I made my initial statement knowing it didn't support NTFS.
But the other person gave me the idea that he thought NTFS would give lower performance than FAT32.
And yes, even Kingston's expensive cards are in many cases low quality cards, Sandisk as well.
That is why most knowledgeable users prefer a hefty amount of NAND storage in the phone as well as an SD slot just in case we need a bit more storage (and that's part of the reason the Galaxy S is so popular as well... No other Android phone has this much in-built storage).
N8ter said:
Yea, I made my initial statement knowing it didn't support NTFS.
But the other person gave me the idea that he thought NTFS would give lower performance than FAT32.
And yes, even Kingston's expensive cards are in many cases low quality cards, Sandisk as well.
That is why most knowledgeable users prefer a hefty amount of NAND storage in the phone as well as an SD slot just in case we need a bit more storage (and that's part of the reason the Galaxy S is so popular as well... No other Android phone has this much in-built storage).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well put that is one of the reasons why I like this phone so many things are well thought out and yes san disk is real junk I never use them on my nikon they write way slow......
N8ter said:
Ntfs has better perdormance than fat, anyways, so I dunno what he means by that.
Its cause the cards are low qual. Kingstons inclided. There was a huge article by someone on the internet about them (not directly the speeds, though).
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/information/usb-flash-drive-comparison-part-2-fat32-vs-ntfs-vs-exfat/
I terms of speed NTFS came in last.
Hey OP, thanks for the test though. Because of this I am returning my Kingston for the Wintec since it's 50 dollars cheaper. Not countering or complaining about this thread, it's just I think most people get different results when it comes to SD cards. I actually thought about it and don't even need that high of a speed for external microsd because my nand is fast enough. Thus the reason why I want the lower pricing. Thanks again for the results.
t1n0m3n said:
http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/information/usb-flash-drive-comparison-part-2-fat32-vs-ntfs-vs-exfat/
I terms of speed NTFS came in last.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's almost a 2 year old article, and it's hardly scientific.
It fails to mention a bunch of factors that affect the performance of NTFS, and doesn't really optimize the other filesystems for the media.
FAT32 is a simple file system with no security, encryption, and recoverability. FAT scaled up for larger volume sizes, basically. (using Fat32 is the reason why Android cannot encrypt SD cards).
NTFS performace scales up (i.e. gets better) the larger the volume gets. FAT32 performance scales down (i.e. gets worse) the larger the volume gets. Typically above 8GB it's better to use NTFS, if you can. The largest size in that article is 8GB and the disks weren't used in a way to really show how the filesystems perform in common scenarios (i.e. searching for files on a disk with lots of files that's 75% full, where NTFS would best FAT easily).
Testing NTFS vs. FAT32 on a bunch of 4GB and 8GB memory sticks proves nothing.
It's not January 2009 anymore. Lots of people have 32 GB+ memory cards/thumb drives and FAT32 performance simply does not scale up at all to those volume levels (not to mention it doesn't support volumes over 32GB without a modified version) compared to NTFS, which gain in performance as the volume size grows larger.
In addition to that, formatting as FAT32 wastes lots of space compared to NTFS. It has HUGE cluster sizes on large volumes (i.e. 16-32GB microSD cards).
exFAT is a pretty good middle road between the two, but NTFS will probably outperform it on large volumes. Its performance is more consistent than FAT32, though.
SD and Thumb drive filesystems corrupt more when formatted as FAT, compared to NTFS, as well.
That article you linked is useless.
N8ter said:
That article you linked is useless.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Since the file systems are older than the article, I don't see how that article doesn't apply.
You are are welcome to link your own test. Give more proof than your word. (Because I, for one, do not believe you.) In terms of raw speed, in our phone, on an SD card (with it's size limitations) ... Give more proof. The other factors are irrelevant to this discussion IMO, due to the discussion being about performance (I infer "performance" to mean "speed" due to the discussion about SD card speed.) Although they are admittedly important, I think you are just trying to use them as a point of obfuscation to try to worm your way out the erroneous statement:
N8ter said:
Ntfs has better perdormance than fat...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
A link to a test performed would do nicely.
I picked up Patriot 8gb class 10 from frys yesterday. I haven't done any tests but the card is significantly faster than stock 2gb card. When i started transferring my files to new card, i thought i copied them to wrong location cause it was going so fast.
I'll run few tests and post results.
mrxela said:
I picked up Patriot 8gb class 10 from frys yesterday. I haven't done any tests but the card is significantly faster than stock 2gb card. When i started transferring my files to new card, i thought i copied them to wrong location cause it was going so fast.
I'll run few tests and post results.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would be very interested in seeing these results, I have yet to see a card faster than a SanDisk Class 6 8GB. However, I would like to start seeing some Class 10 16GB cards that step up to compete with the SanDisk in terms of raw speed.
t1n0m3n said:
Since the file systems are older than the article, I don't see how that article doesn't apply.
You are are welcome to link your own test. Give more proof than your word. (Because I, for one, do not believe you.) In terms of raw speed, in our phone, on an SD card (with it's size limitations) ... Give more proof. The other factors are irrelevant to this discussion IMO, due to the discussion being about performance (I infer "performance" to mean "speed" due to the discussion about SD card speed.) Although they are admittedly important, I think you are just trying to use them as a point of obfuscation to try to worm your way out the erroneous statement:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Anyone with any knowledge about filesystems knows that FAT32 performance degrades when the size of the volume increases. That is why FAT32 has a maximum volume size of 32GB (without workarounds) and even a low maximum file threshold on the volume. It can also hold a low maximum number of files on the volume, because a FAT32 volume with as much files as NTFS supports would probably crash and burn.
When you a volume with a lot of files on it, NTFS will outperform FAT.
If that wasn't the case, Microsoft would have simply added the security and fault tolerate features (among other things) on top of FAT instead of developing NTFS for Windows NT.
FAT lived long because:
1. It's simple to implement, which makes it a great system for inter-OS compatibility.
2. Consumer disk sizes did not grow at a rate proportional to server storage sizes during the reign of pre-NT consumer Winodws OS.
3. Reliability and Security on consumer OSes (including Macs and PCs) simply wasn't taken all that seriously back in the day.
4. Hardly anyone with a PC had a volumes with a ridiculous amount of files on them.
Performance is more than just raw speed. NTFS is faster at searching for files on large volumes than FAT32 - why do you think Media scanner takes forever when you have tons of files on the SD card? It stores small files in the MFT if they can fit there, which makes accessing them monumentally faster than FAT, etc.
The robustness of a filesystem is a component of its performance.
Look at any HD2 thread and one thing you always see is "make sure to format your SD card before installing Android to it, to avoid constant FC's."
The only three advantages over NTFS that FAT32 has is that it is very fast on small volumes (and by volume I mean Capacity as well as the amount of data on the disk), it's relatively cross platform, and it doesn't fragment as much, due to larger cluster sizes (but fragmentation is not much of an issue on flash disks, unless they have very bad random I/O performance).
No links to back you up... Most of what you are talking about doesn't apply in context of this thread. Were this a thread about a pc you would have some valid points.
I am done.
Eat at Joe's
I'm not talking about a PC. I'm talking about storage cards. Load up a 32 GB card with 20GB of music and Albulm Art/Meta Data, Documents, etc. and then compare the FS performance.
I'm sorry you have no idea what you're talking about, that you want me to scour the internet to "back up" something any decent developer/IT professional can agree with.
LOL @ Troll. Were you not the one who responded with a one liner of inconsequential info in an article from almost 2 years ago (Microsoft improved NTFS. NTFS in Win7 isn't the same as NTFS in Windows XP, 2000, or NT 3.1).
At least you got fed.
Like I said, that article you linked is not a "test" in any serious use of the word. I'm not going buy SD cards/thumbdrives to do any sort of test, and I'm certainly not Googling for you. If you want to verify, you can do that yourself. Ad hominems, do not help your point.
Ciao!