Formatting a 1GB SD card

[TheHeretic]

Have you noticed any significant performance increase when using ext2 instead of VFAT ?

MY own tests copying large Ogg and MP3 files to a Lexar 512MB CF card, show ext2 is roughly 10 times slower than FAT

But I'm not sure about SD/MMC cards, I use an MMC card for my home directory which is ext2, but I've never tried transfer tests on it, I formatted it ext2 the day I bought it.

[TheHeretic]

Does this mean that once the file system gets badly corrupted and fsck can't fix it, you can no longer use the card?

That basically was my experience with the cards I got from ebay, one supplier changed the card three times (same brand) and the same problems occured, pain in the butt eh?

[MtnMichael]

I had similar problems with a Kingston 256 card.  I solved my problem by reformating the drive as mkfs.dos.  While the performance isn't stellar, the stability is.  :-)  I've no longer had issues with it mounting as 'ro', no more recursive directory trees, no more I/O errors.  It all works perfectly now.  :-)

Hope that helps.

- Michael

[shula]

i experience similiar phenomena with 512MB "lead data" SD, vfat.
mostly the SD is being automatically remounted readonly DURING WRITE FILE OPERATION.  
that's REALLY bad. i lost some data during long I/Os.
it happens so often so i have an alias to remount automatically as RW  :-(

but it wasn't like this from the start - just 2 months after installing pdaxrom.
i'm on pdaXrom rc8, Zaurus is c860

i tried reformatting, repartitioning - none helped yet.
i'll try mkfs.dos next thing.

s