ste-phan | # 31 | 2014-12-04, 08:55 | Report

$1,476,372USD and 6 days more -> why do I not feel happy to see this reach 1,5 million?

From the somewhat shady explanations about SD -> SDHC -> SDXC we can deduct that once your reader supports SDHC it will be fine with SDXC cards.

http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/de...-compatibility

About the max speed achievable , there is UHS talk and it is not clear which readers will give best performance.

Jolla is kind enough NOT to limit the internal memory by only offering 16GB - 32 GB - 64GB options wich cannot be expanded when need arrises afterwards. Jolla is not forcing the users straight into some cloud storage or to think very hard about the life cycle / memory requirements of their purchase.

The user should understand that having to reformat their new ex-Fat pre-formatted SD card formaking it Sailfish ready is a very small price to pay compared a plausible scenario of running out of fixed memory and having to sell and re-purchase the same but next higher internal memory version or use cloud storage. Even if they have to ask assistance for this.

At the current price of Micro SDXC 64GB cards I don't see users swap them all the time from computer to camera to tablet. Those cards get put and forgotten by common users , just like the HD in their laptop.
Besides, the best form factor for regular swapping is normal SD not Micro SD. (Micro getting lost blown in the wind or swallowed by pet, need for unreliable adapter card, wear on more fragile contacts etc..)

The question is:

Will Jolla integrate instead of paying exFat license integrate a nice GUI formatting SD formatting tool
and last but not least, will the SDXC media itself wear quicker if not using the exFat file system?

For those with warranty concerns:

I recently got RMA exchanged a 10yr waranty 64GB ultra Sandisk that had been behaving bad from the start after I have proven the write errors through some Windows tool that will write chunks of 1GB on the card and verify.

Yes they ask what you did / tried with the card and I told them I tried all different kinds of file systems (ext 4, ext 3, btrfs, NTFS etc) in Nokia N900 and PV808 (devices to "only support" less than 64GB capacity)

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Last edited by ste-phan; 2014-12-04 at 08:59. Reason: Nokia N8 to nokia 808 rerror

benny1967 | # 32 | 2014-12-04, 12:23 | Report

There's no easy answer to this. A while ago I did some research because I really wanted to do The Right Thing™ when formatting an SDXC for the Jolla phone.

From what I understood then (and what I still remember), it's pretty easy to make mistakes without ever noticing (except that the card will be slower and wear out sooner, which you will not know because you didn't test before/after.) One aspect is that file systems in general should keep write operations to a minimum. Journalling file systems have an overhead in this regard, so they might not be the ideal choice. The nice thing about FAT and its children is that they are so unsophisticated, making them a good choice. This is a general (and probably: too) general answer, though. You'd need to compare pros and cons of each file system on flash memory to get a valid answer. (And I, of course, only compared the choices natively available in the Jolla phone's kernel. In this comparison, FAT32 seemed to be the only reasonable choice.)

The other aspect is that when you found a file system that you think is good enough, you'll need some information about the hardware of the SDXC card to keep the logical blocks of the file system and the physical entities of the card in alignment. Otherwise, you'll end up re-writing two 8GB (or larger) blocks when you'd only need to change a few kB that are the file systems smallest unit. Obtaining this information about the hardware is tricky. In theory, you should be able to read it from /sys/block/<devicename>/device/preferred_erase_size and fromcurrently set exFAT parameters. In practice, the value in /sys is often either missing or incorrectly set to 4GB. There are tools that help you detect the right values, but they need human expertise to interpret their output.

So the bottom line is:
When you re-format your card, even to exFAT, chances are very, very high that it doesn't work as well afterwards as it did with the pre-formatted file system. What's worse is that there's no tool that will tell you: "Ooops, something went wrong, block alignment isn't perfect on this card." You'll just keep using a card that is slower than what you paid for and will wear out sooner. So I'd prefer not having to do all this again.

juiceme | # 33 | 2014-12-04, 12:52 | Report

What immediately springs to mind is, if it is possible to fish out the correct parameters from a preformatted SD card before removing the existing exFAT formatting?
Then it would be easy to use the correct parameters to format it to a sensible filesystem?

aegis | # 34 | 2014-12-04, 13:29 | Report

Purely speculation on my part - perhaps someone from Jolla can step in.

There are hardware or maybe even just firmware issues that may be in play. The physical card reader is obviously no different between SD and SDxc but it has been known that some host controllers do not support SDxc.

I would think it unlikely that Jolla would pick a host controller in the first place that didn't allow access to SDxc cards, even without exFAT support, unless there's something about the Intel tablet hardware they're using that doesn't support SDxc unless it's specified as part of the build and switched on in firmware after licencing from SDA.

The other thing I guess is that people* might want to read the SDxc specification and what it says about filesystems and FAT type systems in particular as well as the expectations that are placed on the OS and the host controller that relate directly to the structure of the filesystem and card with respect to timings and placement of things like allocation tables in particular locations. It's quite a complex document but 'FAT' appears all over the place in it, almost like the designed it with that in mind.

If you had the luxury to build a card, controller, specify the filesystem and the OS interaction with it then this debate might make sense. Presumably that's what Samsung are trying to do with f2fs. But until that is ubiquitous we still have the legacy of the SDxc standard and devices that use it.



* I'm sure somebody reads standards documents.

aegis | # 35 | 2014-12-04, 13:31 | Report

Presumably that is what this does...

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

thecursedfly | # 36 | 2014-12-04, 14:07 | Report

Is there any downside in using file system UDF on a microsd card bigger than 32 GB?
I don't have one unfortunately, so cannot test it on the different operating systems; does for example windows ask to format it to exfat anyway? Does it work on linux?

aegis | # 37 | 2014-12-04, 15:14 | Report

Yes. See the discussion which relates to USB keys but most of the same issues will follow for SD...

http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article93/usb-udf

It's unlikely UDF works on consumer devices such as cameras.

Alternative filesystem support is a sideshow though. The issue is "Do you want to support standards that rely on patents or closed licences?" and that issue has already left the building as Jolla ships with many of those already - Exchange, GSM, MP3, H.264, HERE Maps.... and people have signed up for 128GB SDHC (sic) support expecting it making the 'controversy' over exFAT all the more stupid.

juiceme | # 38 | 2014-12-04, 16:03 | Report

Now if that only was available for the OS of my preference

thecursedfly | # 39 | 2014-12-04, 16:42 | Report

I saw the page you link to, and I cannot read about a problem with a 128 GB microsd (or usb stick), as long as it's formatted in the proper way?

Any filesystem different from fat32 or exfat doesn't work on cameras anyway (I think), so I don't expect to use that 128 GB microsd on my camera; for that I'll use a fat32 32 GB one.

Also, on a personal note regarding the whole sdxc issue, for me Jolla is free to do whatever they think is better for them, as long as I will be able to use a 128 GB microsd with any filesystem. Actually I also expect to be able to access the data on that microsd on my windows PC without having to format it (I'm ok with installing a driver or so).
Not so keen on paying extra (exfat in jolla store) for being able to do that though, depending on how much that would be; so the only way I see so far to do that is to use UDF as file system. And that's why I'm looking for any downsides.

Why I wouldn't like to have to pay for it: if Jolla ends up selling exfat through the Jolla store with that as only solution to access the card on Windows, for like 90%+ of consumers (likely Windows users) it will be like if the first perk of their indiegogo campaign is about being able to pay extra for a feature. Which is not mentioned in the first perk. For the 3G/4G perk it's clearly mentioned that there would be an additional cost for the feature instead.
I understand that Jolla devices are popular between Linux users, but to ignore proper support for Windows consumers or telling them to pay extra is being "unfriendly" to the biggest part of the consumer base?

Btw, I'm all but a Microsoft or Windows supporter, it just happens that I use Windows at the moment. Also, I find the exfat <-> SD consortium agreement an absolute wrong thing, which should be sanctioned/cancelled by those useless antitrust bodies.

damn, this got longer than I wanted

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Last edited by thecursedfly; 2014-12-04 at 17:24. Reason: clarification

benny1967 | # 40 | 2014-12-04, 21:45 | Report

Many of them, yes. Some is still guesswork. And of course you can only do this if your computer/phone/tablet can read exFAT in the first place. So if you want a solution that works, say, on the current Jolla phone as a self-contained "reformat this card" script, you cant read and use those parameters.

But it's what I did, of course: I installed exFAT support on a desktop PC and tried to read whatever was visible about the layout of the file system.