64 GB SD-Card shown as 26.5 GB

[kaktux]

I just purchased the Jolla Phone 3 Weeks ago - and now got an extra SD Card.

I bought a Samsung Evo 64 GB, Class 10, UHS-1 (after checking that 64gb seem to work on Jolla):
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage-accessories/MB-SP64D/AM

In the phone (using file browser) it is recognised - under /media/
- but the size is not shown.

So now I am trying to format it to make it work - but this seems to be not possible on the phone.
Also when putting the card into an SD-Adapter, the adapter into and USB-Stick/Card-Reader and plugging this into a pc - only a 26.5 GB Card is shown.
This is for Linux (Netrunner/Kubuntu) and also windows.

First I thought: they made a mistake and it is a 32 GB Card (also the label and the package say 64) - but when searching the net a little others seem to have the 26.5 GB issue to.
Their solutions (the ones I found so far): formatting it using the mobile.
So as this is not yet available for Jolla (at least thats what I found on together.jolla) - I now try to find a way to get the full card size recognised.
I already tested out partition manager on KDE, gparted and the partition manager on Win 7. On all of them only 26.5GB is detected.

If anyone has an idea or knows a solution how to get it to work - this would be great.
PS - I am also not sure about the best format to use for the partition.

[thedead1440]

Is it because its exfat formatted? Windows should be able to detect it properly though so thats strange. Maybe try formatting it to simple fat32 from your Linux box and see if the full 64GB is detected.

[pichlo]

Windows (actually, just Windows Explorer) refuses to format a volume larger than 32GB as FAT and insists on exFAT. To format it as FAT, go to the command line:

Press Windows symbol + R (Windows symbol is usually between left Ctrl and Alt)
Type cmd
Press Enter
In the console window, type format /fs:FAT32 q: (replace q with your drive letter)
Follow instructions

[kaktux]

Thanks for your help guys - that gave me the solution.

Actually it was quite easy:
The Card was exfat formated - but the Card-Reader i used was quite old (about 5 years). I tried it with a newer one: and 58.86 GB were detected using both KDE Partition Manager and gparted (where gparted could also detect exfat).

Thanks again :D

Now I only have to decide which format works best on Jolla and Kubuntu- as far as i know ext4, fat32 and btrfs are supported one the phone.

Edit: also found -vfar/fat32 seems to be the only one working out of the box (well 2013 that was):
https://together.jolla.com/question/2645/recommended-file-system-type-partitioning-scheme-for-the-microsd-card/

[thedead1440]

If you don't intend to use the card on Windows or Mac, ext4 would be ideal. If not, use fat32.

I am pretty sure both the above should work OOB on the Jolla.

[juiceme]

If you don't intend to use the card on Windows or Mac, ext4 would be ideal. If not, use fat32.

I am pretty sure both the above should work OOB on the Jolla.

I second using ext4, as brtfs is probably an overkill.
No sense in using dos formats (fat, exfat) since you'd lose the filesystem attributes and user info.

[pichlo]

I second using ext4, as brtfs is probably an overkill.
No sense in using dos formats (fat, exfat) since you'd lose the filesystem attributes and user info.

And file sizes over 4GB.

But - is there any advantage of using ext4 as opposed to, say, ext2? Especially on a flash storage medium, I would try to shy away from a journaling FS if I can. Please persuade me.

[misterc]

And file sizes over 4GB.

But - is there any advantage of using ext4 as opposed to, say, ext2? Especially on a flash storage medium, I would try to shy away from a journaling FS if I can. Please persuade me.

copy that!
since i started using extX on the N900 )R.I.P. :,( i used ext2 for a couple "wource" partitions
also considering the write speeds in mobile devices (certainly N900, probably Jolla too) any overhead is killing performances as well, especially with a lot of small files (the worst write speeds)

[Fuzzillogic]

And file sizes over 4GB.

But - is there any advantage of using ext4 as opposed to, say, ext2? Especially on a flash storage medium, I would try to shy away from a journaling FS if I can. Please persuade me.

btrfs should detect if it's operating on a Flash-based device. From the feature list (https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php?title=Main_Page#Features):

SSD (Flash storage) awareness (TRIM/Discard for reporting free blocks for reuse) and optimizations (e.g. avoiding unnecessary seek optimizations, sending writes in clusters, even if they are from unrelated files. This results in larger write operations and faster write throughput)

I've formatted my sdcard as btrfs. If it's good enough for Jolla's main storage, it's good enough for some music and stuff. As an added bonus, you don't need to partition the card, and you'll get btrfs' checksum validated reads - it's better to get an error than unwittingly reading corrupted data.