maemo.org - Talk - n800, SD, SDHC, and storage

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- - n800, SD, SDHC, and storage (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=5118)

n800, SD, SDHC, and storage

There are a lot of threads on this discussion forum, and blog posts around, that have some confusing information regarding various SD cards and their usability in the n800.

I spent the last 6 hours digging through all of them to make sure I had the entire story, and I thought I'd shove everything into a single post.

The n800 stock kernel currently supports SD 1.0 and SD 1.1 cards (hardware support) and both Fat16 and Fat32 file systems. The stock kernel does not support SDHC (SD 2.0) cards.

The n800 file manager application only formats in Fat16, but will read Fat32 partitions just fine.

In a nutshell, then, you can plug *any* SD card < 4GB into your n800 and everything will "just work". You can use 4GB cards that are NOT SDHC cards, but (a) these cards are not official SD 1.0 cards and (b) the file manager will format them as fat16 devices, which will limit them to 2GB, so you need to format them on another device (like a PC) as Fat32 file systems to get the 4GB of usable space out of them. The 4GB cards (that *aren't* SDHC) are technically outside of any spec (they don't conform to 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0 of the SD specification), so they are liable to produce buggy results, use at your own risk. Note that many people are using the 4GB cards with little problems.

There is a kernel patch available to make your n800 support SDHC cards - this is available here http://intr.overt.org/blog/?p=44. Commercially, there are 8 GB SDHC cards readily available. Vendors are releasing 16GB SDHC cards at various points this year. RiDATA 16GB SDHC cards are being showcased 08-11 Mar 2007 - http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/RIDATA-...-PMA-Show.html.

So, to sum up:

If you don't want to get adventurous, don't buy any card bigger than 2GB and make sure that the card you buy is not SDHC, and you top out at 4GB.

If you're a little bit adventurous, buy a 4GB non-SDHC card and you can top out at 8GB.

I'll try and get a list of known to be working cards. For the ubergeeks amongst us, my theory is that certain of the 4GB cards have a voltage problem that makes them buggy with the n800, that's just a SWAG.

If you want to kernel hack your n800, you should be able to buy and use 8GB SDHC cards, right now, in your n800.

If you wait until the next release of the OT 2007 OS, the SDHC patch (according to a blog I can't find at the moment) should have been included. I have been unable to find out if the File Manager app will also be updated when this occurs (I certainly hope so, and encourage everybody to email Ari Jaaksi (http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/) or post to his blog to encourage him to make sure that (a) the kernel patch is incorporated (b) the file manager app is updated to default to fat32.

Oh, and finally, flash memory cards are probably going to plummet in price in the next 3 months as the higher capacity cards hit the mainstream, so if budgeting is an issue, patience will reward you well at this point.

Whoo! Forget an iPod, within a year I'd say the probability is > .99 that you'll be able to walk around with 32x2=64GB of storage in your n800!