SD Cards

[Stephane Hockenhull]

Also don't forget to take power consumption into account. Spinning discs eat batteries for breakfast.

this is false:


http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2.5-hard-drive-charts-2008/Idle-Power-Consumption,681.html


best: 0.3W / 5Volts = 60mA idle


most: 0.8W / 5Volts = 160mA idle


once the drive is spun up, there isn't much current draw.


much less than an internet 3G USB key.


I drove 3 times across North America coast-to-coast in the last 12 months with an old 250GB HDD in a USB case plugged to the BB as my music player, in a 12 year old E-350 commercial van (far from the smoothest suspension, leaf springs and worn shock absorbers) HDD is still working fine.


anyway, I'm just putting this idea out there for those who want/need portable storage without breaking the bank, mp3/ogg/video playback doesn't cause seeks so the drive stays very near its idle power draw.


4x the storage at 1/3 of the price, and you can leave the drive in your pocket.

 

[vadsamoht]

^ but on a standard computer system, the drive is constantly spinning up or spinning down.

 

[Stephane Hockenhull]

^ but on a standard computer system, the drive is constantly spinning up or spinning down.

that's only if you don't disable this stupid OS "feature" on the system drive (and some OSes don't let you set it per drive so you gotta turn it off for all drives).


its better for the drives to stay on all the time than power cycle every 5 mins, much less wear and uses less power since today's OSes keep accessing the system drive periodically (log files, cron jobs, etc).


most HDD failures (and computer parts in general) are caused by thermal stress: heat/power cycling.


if your computer keeps powering on and off the drives you're likely to kill them in a year or two depending on the frequency of the power cycling.


drive's SMART status keeps track of power cycle count and spin up count for this exact reason.

 

[_wb_]

Bytes per bucks, HDDs are best. So for mass storage or backup purposes, nothing beats good old HDDs. Power consumption can be reasonable, if you take care to choose the right drive and configure your OS well. But it is still about an order of magnitude more than SD cards or SDD. So I wouldn't use it in a permanent way with a Pandora, like duct-taping it to its back

 

[CPUnltd]

Can confirm Sandisk 64GB class 10 Ultra seems to work fine at a base level... haven't gamed or emulated off it yet... to be continued...

 

[Grench]

Can confirm Sandisk 64GB class 10 Ultra seems to work fine at a base level... haven't gamed or emulated off it yet... to be continued...

Can you benchmark it similar to what I did here?





You don't have to go quite as crazy as I did of course - just running the in-partition non-destructive read/writes to whatever partition types you have should be fine. I'm interested to see if the Pandora can make any use out of that card's greater speed.


Thank you!

 

[aagron08]

I have a quick question. The 128 gb Lexar Professional was confirmed to work on the Pandora. How exactly do you get it to even show us as a disk on the pandora?

 

[WizardStan]

Just insert it (almost). It is probably formatted as exFat which is unsupported, so you may have to format it to FAT32, NTFS, or EXT2/3 first using your desktop. Alternatively, gparted should be able to help directly on the Pandora.

 

[Lao Rebel]

My Pandora might ship soon, so I was curious is there any need for me to worry about compatibility issues like I had with my GP2X?


Is the Pandora able to read SDHC and SDXC cards? I assume at least SDHC.


I'm looking at these two guys:


http://www.amazon.co...34072821&sr=8-4


http://www.amazon.co...34072821&sr=8-1

i got two SDXC 64gb class 6. working fine. just format to fat32.

 

[Grench]

Ya - I'm weird that way. The first thing I did when I opened the package on that new 128GB card was to put it into my Pandora and re-partition it.


I have found that command line formatting seems to work better for me than the formatting in Gparted - though either command line or gparted work fine for creating the partitions themselves.