2 Tb Memory card working but better Format?

Hardware Adaptation
#1

I purchased a 2 tb micro as card off eBay for $40. Formatted it to fat32 and it works in my Sony Xperia 10ii on sailfish 4.3 and is recognized as 1.9 tb. Originally bought 2 tb because that is the fat32 limit.

Fat32 is the most universal but has a 4gb filesize limit. What other formats are supported by sailfish that doesn’t have the file size limit? Had issues with Mac journaled the other day when I tried it. Maybe it was user error lol

image
image3024×4032 2.86 MB

, idk.

#2

You can use ext4 on SFOS. I don’t know how the support on Mac is.

#3

I don’t see a problem with displayed capacity.
Storage advertised can (maybe even will) always differ from displayed storage for multiple reasons. To mention 2, of many,

  • Often you are sold some capacuty in MB, with decimal conversion instead of the usual binary translation. The store says 2TB = 2,000,000MB. A computer says 2,000,000 / 1024^2 = less than 2TB. Not sure if I got the details right, but it is the general idea.
  • Storage needs a partition table. They take up space. Not much but still. It is possible sailfilsh rounds down a little bit less than 2TB to 1.9TB.

Any or both or other reasons may apply here as reason why less than expected storage capacity is displayed. A different file system will not make a significant difference in that regard.
For maximum file size it might be difderent. Most obvious choice for sd card would be exFAT. Does anyone know if SFOS support that?

#4

Don’t mean to rain into your parade, but 40$ for 2TB sounds way too cheap to be true IMHO, eBay or not. 1TB cards of known brands are in the range of 150$+ ATM. I haven’t heard of any 2 TB cards being available at all.

I don’t think it’s legit and I would recommend to double-check the capacity before you trust any data to that card.

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#5

Mac doesn’t support ext4. The only Filesystem supported in-Kernel by Windows, Mac & Linux is exFAT, altough Linux only supports it since Kernel version 5.4, which you may not have. Additionally, it maybe isn’t so good for a SDcard in the long term. ext4 with journaling enabled is definately a very bad idea for a SDcard, reducing its lifespan with too many writes. I would rather go with f2fs which is supported on all Sailfish devices >= XA2 and its name FlashFriendFileSystem already hints, made for emmc and Sdcards specifically.

#6

I’d second this. AFAIK the top-brands don’t have more than 1TB offerings, so sounds like a scam which reports a wrong size. You can try to run dd if=/dev/zero bs=1G count=1200 conv=fsync of=/path/to/sdcard/output_file to check it’s real capacity, but be aware that you a huge write doing this.

#7

There’s another: UDF.

Initially invented for Bluray/DVD, but extended to support HDD and flash media as well.

It’s my favourite fs for portable media these days. Unfortunately not supported in Sailfish (at least not the X10 kernel).

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4.5.0.19: why am I not able to `mv` files to /media/sdcard? `setfilecon` Operation not supported
#8

Even a 256GB SD card of reputable quality costs a lot more than $40 (£30), more like £60 ($80)

So, 2 TB card…um, I don’t find too many of them for sale ANYWHERE on the net, sounds like you’ve been mugged off by clever formatting. Use something like Minitool Partition Wizard, this will show you the correct size of your card; my guess?, it’s a 2GB card in reality.

"If it sound to good to be true. . . . "

#9

I find F2FS is best for SD cards. Should be supported by most kernels, although there isn’t a formatting tool in Sailfish so you’ll have to format the card elsewhere.

#10

I’ve got a 256 GB SD card in use, out of the box and i didn’t any special formatting before using it. It reports to have ‘vfat’ file system and works fine.