SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I am close to buying an N800, but I'm scared off by the complaints about SDHC cards getting fried by the interior and exterior card slots. I would want my N800 to gave 8 gigs of flash memory right from the start, and I would probably want to ramp up to 16 gigs soon, so these problems are a major concern. Any thoughts about this dilemma would be appreciated.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

You won't get a clear answer. I think most people don't have problems.
But some are having problems... And we hope that Nokia will provide us a
solution (sooner or later). It isn't clear if this a software or hardware issue.
I would buy only one card and then test it in both slots with large
file transfers. If you don't have any problems ... buy a second card.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

Read bug #1204 from comment #20 onwards and make up your own mind...

If you want my advice: don't use any expensive cards in the N800 for the time being, or alternatively restrict your usage to the internal slot which seems less likely to slay a card than the external slot.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

As I understand it, the original n800-sdhc-kernel didn't produce these card destruction problems, that was the Nokia enhancement.

Is there anything to be gained by applying this kernel patch after flashing the 4.2007.26-8 firmware upgrade?

Also is there sufficient collective experience to suggest that some makes/types of cards are more prone to this damage than others.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I purchased a 4 GB SDHC card made by Sandisk. It is one of the ordinary "blue" cards, not one of the Ultra II's or anything fancy. I bought it for ~$40 at Best Buy. It has been working just fine in my N800's internal slot. I have used the included card reader to transfer several GB worth of data (Maemo Mapper stuff) to it thus far.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

Yeah, I am still not clear on what kind of 8 GB SDHC card to get for the N800 and whether the N800 can even use most of the memory bandwidth, etc. There are all kinds of Ultras, class 2, class 6, different brands, etc. I have no idea which one to get. Most of them seem to be around $80 in the US. Getting a cheaper one would lessen the loss from the memory corruption risk.

Travis

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

It's difficult to say for sure, but you may be correct - Nokia have omitted some of the changes that went into the old SDHC patch, and the author of the old patch is putting together a new 4.2007 patched kernel for release soon.

If you look earlier in that bug, specifically comments 12 and 13, there appears to be evidence of SD cards being knackered by a previous firmware (doesn't say which, but most likely 3.2007). Since these are standard SD cards that are being knackered it's also likely these users were not using the SDHC patched kernel. I don't recall seing any reports of SDHC card destruction using the old patch, yet a disturbingly high number of such reports with the new firmware.

I wouldn't expect it to work to be honest, there are bound to be other kernel changes in the new firmware which won't be present in the old 3.2007 kernel. Best to wait until a new unofficial 4.2007 + SDHC patch becomes available.

There are a few reports of Transcend and SanDisk cards dying, but that could simply because they're quite popular - I own 4 Transcend SDHC Class 2 cards because they're cheap and quite fast, and all are OK so far. I also own one 4GB SanDisk SDHC Class 2 card but would not recommend SanDisk as they don't seem to have any support for high speed or wide data bus modes (basically, SanDisk SDHC cards suck on performance!)

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I have two A-Data 8 GB SDHC cards. One just died on me. I got them from newegg.com for prety cheap. Like $118 delivered. It does happen that i use the n800 quite a bit, and could be that i wore it out. More likely that the cheap card wasn't manufactured to the highest standard.

In the mmc1 slot, the card would simply stop allowing writes, even though the filesystem was mounted as read/write. I swapped cards in the slots, and now the bad one wont even mount.

I will likely go with a better brand, and may look for a higher class card for better performance.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

Another report of the dying SDHC cards:

Yesterday I had downloaded a good 200Mb of Maemo Mapper maps to the 8Gb Class 6 Transcend card in the external slot.

All was fine.

Then I fired up the RSS reader and dragged down 2x 30 - 40Mb podcasts from Technometria.

Up came Canola and the podcast started only to abruptly stop. A quick look in file manager shows the card as corrupted. A reboot then shows the card as not installed.

Today I bought a new USB card reader and low and behold the card had lost it's file table and needed reformatting. 30 minutes later (no quick format here) and the card is back and working in the N800.

So I tried the same downloads again, and sure enough as soon as Canola started playing a repeat performance of "The Card's Last Dance"

Never had a single problem pre.v4 firmware and I'm using the same build of canola.

Not technical enough to start working out what is actually causing the problem, but at a punt trying to write and/or read at speed from the card seem to kill it.

If I can get it working again, I'll try the internal slot next.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

Okay, a quick reformat and the 8GB card in the internal slot this time...

If I write the files to the SD card via a USB card reader on a Windows XP machine, the N800 appears to be able to read them just fine.

If I transfer files from the other SD card (1GB) or internal memory to the SDHC card all goes fine.

If I try to download maps or podcasts from the internet on the N800 and write them to the SDHC it goes all wrong.

It appears that the write process gets all confused and trashes the file allocation table (?) as a quick format sees the card back up and running.

Anyone having the same behaviour?

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

If I buy an N800 now, will it come with the immediate past version of the OS? That would be okay, because then I could install the SDHC patch and use it with 8gb cards. Then, when the new version of the OS is fixed, I can update. Anything wrong with this plan?

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

Just another experience report:

I have destroyed one 2GB non-SDHC card in my N800 few months ago. (The firmware was propably the first one to ship with N800 when they just came out.) This card is not recognized with any device I tried. It was in the external slot.

Another 4GB non-SDHC did suffer corruptions many times but was always able to recover by either Windows disk check tool or reformatting. Lately it became so erratic that I quit using that card completely... This card was used both in external and internal slots. I did not see any difference on stability.

Third card I had is the 8GB Patriot SDHC card that worked without problems with 3.... firmware and using the SDHC kernel patch. I had that about 5-6 weeks running. It was in the internal slot.

Once I updated to the latest 4.... firmware the 8GB Patriot card corrupted after about a week use. It was in the internal slot. It happened when I was on road trip using Maemo Mapper. It seemed to happen when the N800 was in "sleep mode" (display was dark) and likely there was simultaneous download of map file from internet (using phone as a DUN modem). Maybe the file system and ethernet have some critcal processes that can cause the file system not to write properly to the card and corrupts it???

Reformatting the 8GB card recovered it, but I put it aside now until a real fix is found for this issue!

One more thing: I was able to corrupt even a 1GB MMC card in external slot once. This was a card I used in 770 before without any issues ever!

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

It will probably take another few weeks for the new firmware to replace the current firmware that is on shelves.

Onlt that there is no reason to believe Nokia will replace the current SDHC-unfriendly firmware with a quick update... best bet would be to replace the official 4.2007 kernel with the unoficial SDHC kernel once this becomes available.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

Just this morning... Uhg... I guess it's a reformat - again - for me. I think it's related to the media player thing that scans the files, but I am not 100% sure of that. I look forward to applying the SDHC patch to the kernel... When is that going to be ready? And - thank you to whomever is doing that!

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

Very interesting thread (and bug report on bugzilla). I want to replace the internal SD with an 8GB card as soon as possible, but I'll hold back for now.

Since January I have used the original 128MB card in the internal slot, and kept a Kingston 1GB card in the external slot (occasionally replaced with a 1GB MMC Plus card from my camera, and now and then various other 1GB or 512MB cards).

No problems so far, so I'll stick to those cards for the time being.. but I'm feeling the lack of internal SD space more and more, so I hope this gets resolved soon.

Er, and I'm not using Canola or any other scanning software (except for the built-in metacrawler).

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I was just going to buy 8GB SDHC card to external slot. I have had 4GB at internal slot and never had problems. Hope it stays that way..

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I just posted this message in another thread regarding the exact same thing:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...8&postcount=15

My cards had become corrupted too, and where I really noticed it was using Canola. The songs would be in the listing, but when it tried to play the songs, some of them would give an "Error" message. Plus, the "Rescan" button never seemed to finish on mine...I could be doing something a few hours later, and then the "Canola finished..." window would pop up where the battery meter is. I deleted my 128 swap file and reformatted both cards from within the File Manager, and all is well now. I also deleted Canola.

Do you have Canola installed on your N800? If so, we may have found the culprit for the funky card problems. I am using the same Patriot 8GB SDHC cards as you. I guess I could start using the built-in media player, but the UI really leaves something to be desired.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

No Canola here. I do have UKMP and UKTube, which I would hate to lose.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I also didn't install canola on my N800... So I think that couldn't be the problem ;)

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

It sounds similar to what happened to my 4 gig non-sdhc card when I installed the new firmware.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I think it's the new firmware. This didn't happen with the SDHC kernel patch.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

Bug 1024 started before v4.2007. And I had already Problems with one
of my SD cards in first N800 firmware 2.2007!
I am not sure if this problem is really caused by the kernel.
Perhaps some background daemon (like metalayer-crawler) is the problem.
But I think that this problem became larger with the new firmware.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

So the latest on my front is that the problem was repeatable using the Transcend 8Gb SDHC card in either the internal or external slots.

I'm fairly certain it wasn't Canola reading the files, rather that when writing the files it all went screwy.

After 3 or 4 of these FAT corruptions, Windoze then started reporting the card as actually being 6.84Gb (down from 7.5Gb formatted).

Another couple of tests (hey if the card is toast why not?) and it is firmly past it with no piece of software I have access to being able to format it at all. Windoze is reporting multiple disk errors and it all looks terminal for the card.

A chat with Transcend last night and they recommend returning to retailer for help.

For now I am rolling back to V3 with the patch before going anywhere near SDHC cards - at least until a patched kernel is released.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I have a 2GB Kingston MMC Card in the External Slot. It works fine with the v3 firmware, but as soon as I upgrade to v4 it appears as corrupt. If I reflash back to v3, the card is detected and I can read/write to it just fine. The same card can also be read/write from my 770, my Nokia E60 phone and a Windows XP PC. It just seems to be the v4 firmware that can't mount it in the External Slot. I don't think it works in the Internal Slot with the v4 firmware either, but I have rechecked it since going back to the v3 firmware. It's not specific to one particular 2GB card either; I have a second one in the 770 and that behaves in exactly the same way. :mad:

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

I had this behavior with v3.2007 (Transcend 8GB in external slot) and sdhc-kernel!
Some input/output errors while writing to SDHC and then only 5GB were
recognized! My dealer exchanged this card.
What I didn't knew was that "Panasonic SD Formatter" can reformat these
cards and recognize the "real" size... It could be possible that this tool
is able to revive such a card!
But my newly corrupted cards aren't recognized by this panasonic tool anymore ;(

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

My Class 6 8GB Transcend SDHC card has just gone read only on me using the v4.2007 kernel. This happened before using the v3.2007 with SDHC patch. I don't run canola, but make heavy usage of media player and mplayer. I use gpodder alot for downloading podcasts but the files are written to my 2GB RS-MMC card which has never had any problems.
Last time it was fixed by a reformat so will try that again.

Re: SDHC memory problems and purchase decision
 

i ran the sdhc patched kernel on my n800 without any issues. when i put the new firmware v4 on my n800, the card was giving me read only errors and what not. i thought it was data corruption and reformatted the card.

after the format, and loosing tons of maemo mapper tiles, i could then write to the card, but only for a short period of time. it soon was back to read only access even though a 'mount' from the command line showed the mount point as 'rw' (read/write enabled).

again, i had no issues with fanoush's sdhc kernel patch on v3 firmware, but more and more people seem to be having issues with the v4 firmwares sdhc support. i would hope that if my card is ruined, that i would be entitled to a replacement. i have to do some triage to see if the card is writeable in other devices (windows laptop, linux server, etc), since my n800 now does not even see the card when inserted.

does anyone know if a surface scan on flash media will turn up bad sectors in the media, even though there really is no physical media?