Prefered SD card

[edo]

I\'ve had a fair amount of experience of Sandisk and PNY cards. Sandisk seem to be okay if you leave them as FAT16 file-systems. I\'ve had a Sandisk CF 512Mb card that I\'ve juggled from Zaurus SL-5500 Sharp Rom 3.10 to digital camera to usb card reader, and never had any problems.

My Sandisk 512Mb Secure Digital (SD) card, bought recently (May 2004) has needed multiple fdisk-ing, mke2fs-ing, and e2fsck-ing, and I\'ve decided it is not up to the job. My PNY 256Mb SD card has worked fabulously for the past year, and is now back in service, as I return the Sandisk card back to the vendor. Thinking of getting a Toshiba 512Mb SD card to replace the Sandisk.

Regards,
Edo

________________
Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 with Sharp Rom 3.10
PNY 256Mb SD card (formatted mmcda1 = ext2 and mmcda2 = fat16)
Linksys WCF12 wireless compactflash card
Rikaline GPS-6021-X6 gps receiver compactflash card
Sandisk 512Mb compactflash card (formatted fat16)

[mk500]

I\'m not having any luck with SD cards.  My 256MB lexar died on me last week, now my only other one (128mb Sandisk) is acting up.

Is there a SD card out there that is prefered by Zaurus owners?  Has anybody tried the kingston cards?

I have a PNY 256 that has worked for many months of heavy use in my C760. It says \"made in Japan\" on the back.

[zaurusbs]

i have a 512MB Sandisk SD card, 512MB Sandisk CF card, two 128MB Viking CF cards, all of which work fine. the only card i own that is not recognized at all by the Z (5600, sharp ROM) is a Crucial 64MB CF.

[qx773]

I have a 512MB eFilm SD Delkin Devices card which has worked without any problems for me.

[rikiya]

Am I wrong or wasn\'t Panasonic the one who invented Secure Digital cards for their media products?

[wirawan0]

Adding to the list: I purchased a Lexar Media 256MB card (32x speed). I reformatted to ext2 on the filesystem, but didn\'t do the fdisk to change the partition type to ext2. I bought this on early April. Result: after 2 months, the card died on me. I was successful to salvage the data (except a few corrupt inodes and/or blocks). Reading was OK but when it\'s time to write, the card was acting up all the time. It this problem a persistent one, considering that others have problems with Lexar 256MB also (although IIRC not everybody with the same card complained)? I just returned my card to them, and had a few days to consider whether to get a replacement or just refund.

[qx773]

Maybe you should use the noatime option in /etc/fstab on the line where your SD card gets mounted so that writes of the file\'s access time do not occur to the SD card every time that you access a file.

[TonyOlsen]

I found a few Toshiba 512 MB SD cards selling for around $90 ( http://www.pricewatch.com/1/226/5642-1.htm ).  2 questions:

1 - Has anyone here tried Toshiba SD cards?  Are they to be trusted?
2 - Does anyone know of a cheaper deal for 512 MB SD cards?

I wanted a 1 GB SD card, but they are currently still at around $250 and up, and I could almost buy 3 512 MB cards for that price... so I\'m holding out for now.

Thanks in advance!

[dfb]

The sandisk reports are HORRIBLE, no wonder they are always on sale.

One thing to note with those Sandisk cards is that I think that list is dated, and the latest ones seem to work better.  It may be telling though, that many of those that complained about Sandisk cards were using cards around the time of those reviews!

I just got some SanDisk 256MB cards and formatted them for the ext2 filesystem (fdisk type \"83\" Linux, mkfs /dev/mmcda1) for my two SL6000s as per the instructions on http://docs.zaurus.com/. Everything looked good, but after a while, I started getting flaky messages when I did \"ls\" on /mnt/card. This happened after I started filling up the filesystem, so I\'m guessing the formatting screwed up and made some necessary metadata a writable part of the filesystem, and as I filled it up I started clobbering the metadata. Now nothing seems to work. I tried using my digital camera to reformat to FAT16 format, but it now thinks my 256MB card has 3.6MB.

Any pointers would be appreciated. Thanks.

[nacs]

Wow. I wish I had read this thread before I purchased a Sandisk 256MB SD card last week.

Within literally 2 days after I\'d bought the card, I was getting file system errors in the Zaurus. I took that Piece of S**t back to Best Buy and am currently awaiting my Panasonic 256MB to arrive from Amazon (I had a 16MB Panasonic SD card that I had gotten free that\'s been working well in the Zaurus for over a year so I decided to go the Panasonic route again).

Lesson learned: Don\'t buy Sandisk SD Cards. (I\'m sure there are a few who don\'t have problems but from reading this thread and in my own experience, Sandisk quality sucks).

[zxerx]

1 - Has anyone here tried Toshiba SD cards?  Are they to be trusted?

IMHO Toshiba are the only SD card manufacturer to bother with. They developed SD cards (together with Matsushita (Panasonic) and SanDisk). Toshiba manufacture Panasonic branded cards, including their high end brand "Hagiwara". All their SD cards are made in Japan.

The price of US$90 is excellent, so I figured I'd try to find out exactly what was for sale. The seller Digi4me.com has their 512Mb SD Toshiba OEM card on this website: http://store.yahoo.com/digi4me/pr51sedisflm.html which doesn't really have much info. They also have the card on eBay at http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...item=3823686209 which states they will ship worldwide for US$15.

Unfortunately they don't give a product number, but they look visually idential (but without the Toshiba brandname) to the cards on the Toshiba product info site here http://www.toshiba.co.jp/p-media/english/c...ineup/index.htm [Note the 2Gb SD card - mmmmmmnn].

There is another online seller Digi4All.com (very similar name) that is also selling 512Mb Toshiba OEM SD cards here http://store.yahoo.net/s168/tooem51sedis.html. They are a little more expensive at US$96, but they do have a product number SD-M512B1. A little more searching turns up Toshiba's product release web page on SD-M512BX here: http://www.toshiba.com/taec/press/to-334.shtml. Note that these cards were only announced a year ago, and are capable of 10Mbits/sec, whereas the SD-M512B1 is 2Mbit/sec according to Digi4All.

Going off on a tangent a bit, I'd like to point out that Hagiwara have been making 10Mbit/sec SD cards for quite a while. They have their standard 2Mb/sec "T-Series" cards here: http://www.hscjpn.co.jp/co_english/products_c.php?idno=114 and their 10Mbit/sec "M-Series" cards here: http://www.hscjpn.co.jp/co_english/products_c.php?idno=180. (Of course the zaurus can't use the card at 10Mbit/sec).

I have had a 256MB Hagiwara "M-Series" card for about 10 months and it has performed flawlessly - I want to get a 512MB one, but they are very expensive: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1

So, getting back to the card Digi4Me.com have on offer, it is my suspicion that their Toshiba OEM 512Mb SD cards are old stock that pre-dates the announcement of the SD-M512BX 10Mbit/sec cards, and that they are rated at 2Mbit/sec.

It would cost me about AU$150 to get hold of these or AU$300+ to get a Hagiwara 10Mbit/sec card or AU$200+ to get a no-name card. Hmmn, I think I'm gonna buy one...... thanks for the tip-off

PS: After a reasonable amount of listening to hearsay and conjecture, it's my opinion that you should only buy SD/CF cards that are made in Japan - the rest have a much higher failure incidence.

[nacs]

I got the Panasonic 256MB SD card from Amazon as mentioned in previous post and it's been working flawlessly. No problems yet unlike the POS Sandisk SD card I owned earlier.

[mjalkut]

I've been doing some research on Sandisk, since this and other threads are bashing them so much, and this is so contrary some of the camera review sites (notably Steves Digicams) which is claiming the Sandisk Ultra II series as the best and fastest on the market.

I found a report from the last CES show where Sandisk was boasting a switch to the new ARC cores for their engines in the Ultra II and Extreme series cards, both SD and CF, and now Sony Sticks.  I don't know what Sandisk made their cards with previously (ARM? Mips? Anyone know?), but I do notice that on the benchmark sites cited by Steves and DPReview, the Ultra IIs are beating the socks off the competition on cameras that can actually keep up.  The Ultra IIs are actually consistently exceeding their promised read and write speeds of 10Mbs, while most of the other brands have a difficult time living up to their claims.  Granted, the Zaurii can't do IO this fast, but perhaps this bodes well for the future of Sandisk.  I have an Ultra II CF and while it wont write any faster on a Z, it does read at about twice the rate of a normal sandisk and others.

Here are links to Steves and a CF benchmark site....

http://www.steves-digicams.com/high-capacity_storage.html
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

And here are quotes endorsing Sandisk's Ultra II....

CF:
Here's the fastest as of February 2004. The Lexar Media 80x Pro Series with Write Acceleration Technology (WA), and the new SanDisk Ultra II.

SD:
The new SanDisk Ultra II & Extreme SD cards are the fastest in the world and now they're also large enough to be mentioned on my High Capacity Storage report.

Disclaimer:
While I don't work for Sandisk, I do work for ARC, International, the chipset in the Ultra II.  I write and maintain compilers for most embedded processors and the ARC configurable core holds promise of reaching new heights in low-power, small, configurable processors with short time-to-market capabilities.  I think the Ultra II proves ARC's case, and maybe opens a new horizon for Sandisk.

[nacs]

That may very well be true mjalkut. It's possible that the Zaurus and Sandisk SD cards just don't get along well--it could be a Zaurus problem or it could be a Sandisk SD problem. Either way, it's obviously risky to get a Sandisk SD card for use with a Zaurus.

Also, I was bashing Sandisk SD in my previous posts so I must point out that I have owned a Sandisk CF card for months now and have had 0 problems. It's just their SD cards that I've had bad experiences with.

[doc]

Good advice on the "noatime" option in fstab.

One other quetion I posted on a similar topic on another board...

"Is it advisable to reformat the cards to ext2 filesystems instead of vfat?"

Also, if you do that, how do you get the card to auto update the documents tab?  I repartioned my card and put ext2 on it and it wouldn't get recognized.

I have had badluck with SanDisk, although they will replace bad memory if you call them and ask for a return through FedEx.

I'm currently using Viking, but only had it for a few days.