Sandisk 512Mb SD card
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I've been using a 256Mb PNY card successfully on my Zaurus SL5500 for months now, but wanted more space. A 512Mb Sandisk Secure Digital card became available to me, at a very good price. Even though I knew that Sandisk historically had problems with Zaurii, I decided to get it.

I first tried running it with two partitions. The first partition, mmcda1 as an Ext2 formatted partition, and mmcda2 as FAT16 formatted. It didn't like this, so after fiddling, retrying, I gave up and decided to just go for one big Ext2 partition.

The single Ext2 partition worked fine for about a week, then I got file-system errors, and I lost data. I tried fixing the problems, with e2fsck but it didn't help. A clean file-system rebuild was needed, with fdisk and mke2fs. Multiple fixes, rebuilds, data losses later, and I've decided that the card isn't up to the job.

I've gone back to my well-behaved PNY card for now, and I will be returning my Sandisk 512Mb Secure Digital card, and hopefully finding a better-behaved one (from another manufacturer). Although not tested, the card will probably behave okay if it is only formatted with a single FAT16 partition. However, that is not how I wanted to run it.

My system: Sharp SL5500 running Sharp Rom 3.10

Added:  Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Related Link:  Sandisk SD cards
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