SD compatibility list

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Revision as of 20:01, 7 May 2011 by T4b (talk | contribs) (Added my Transcend card, has different problems from the other one and they are not as bad. Probably going to send it back though.)
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This is a compatibility list for SD, SDHC and SDXC cards. The cards listed in green work with any file system. The cards listed in yellow work well only with one file system (this still means they can be used on the Pandora). The cards listed in red do not work well with any file system.

Note: always measure read speed with this command:

  • in left slot: dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/null bs=4MiB count=100
  • in right slot: dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 of=/dev/null bs=4MiB count=100

If you can afford destroying all your data, you can test write speed. But be careful, you will need to create a new partition table, afterwards! You can use Gparted to make new partition table.

  • in left slot: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4MiB count=100
  • in right slot: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=4MiB count=100


SDHC card brand Card size Card class Full name URL fat32 is working? ext2/3/4 are working? read speed MB/sec write speed MB/sec actual capacity (1024byte blocks) Notes
Kingston 1GB ? Kingston 1GB (blue) [1] (looks very similar to that one, except that I have 1GB) yes yes 12.5 ? 1006080 ok
Kingston 16GB 4 Kingston 16 GB Class 4 SDHC [2] no no 15 9.5 15663104 Bad controller chip, fails in the same manner as the 32GB card.
Kingston 32GB 4 Kingston 32 GB Class 4 SDHC [3] no no 16 9.5 31539200 Defective flash controller randomly loses writes regardless of filesystem. When attempting to write, blocks sometimes get erased but not written.
Kingston 32GB 10 class 10, kingston 32GB (red) [4] like this, but 32GB: [5] yes no 15.2 ? ? doesn't have badblocks, seems that "Flash Translation Layer" is not suitable for ext filesystems
Lexar 64GB 10 Lexar Professional 64GB 133x [6] yes yes 19.6 15.1 62536704 R/W speed in the pandora is limited to 16.1/11.3 MB/sec. High power consumption, may fail under load.[7]
Patriot 32GB 10 Patriot LX 32GB SDHC Class 10 (PSF32GSDHC10) [8] [9] yes no 18.1 12.6 ? Formatting EXT2 and then running fsck right after finds errors. Seems to work well with fat32
Pretec 4GB 10 Class 10, Pretec 4GB, 233x (white/green) [10] yes yes I had very few fsck problems, and after several tries running fsck, they eventually got corrected. 14.0 ? 3883008 It looks very similar to that broken 32GB pretec. Except that this one almost works good.
Pretec 32GB 10 class 10, Pretec 32GB 233x (white/green) [11] yes no 14.1 12.4 ? doesn't have badblocks, seems that "Flash Translation Layer" is not suitable for ext filesystems
SanDisk 8GB 10 SanDisk SDHC Extreme 30MB Edition [12] yes yes ? ? ? Works nice. Installed Angstrom on it and copied some stuff onto it. Angstrom runs as fast as from NAND. Best thing was, where I ordered it it said class 6, but it is actually 10. :-D Still have to test its speed and actual size. Didn't test Fat a lot, but it seemed to work.
SanDisk 32GB 4 SanDisk Ultra 32 GB Class 4 SDHC [13] yes yes 16.4 7.1 31166976 OK.
Sandisk 64GB 4 Sandisk 64GB SDXC Class 4 [14] yes yes 16.1 4.5 62367744 Works fine
Topram 32GB 6 TOPRAM 32GB CLASS 6 SDHC HIGH SPEED (TRSD32GSDHCR3) [15] ? ? ? ? ? Reported working here.
Transcend 32GB 10 Transcend 32GB SDHC Class 10 [16] no no ? ? ? Has serious issues [17]
Transcend 64GB 10 Transcend SDXC Card 64GB ULTIMATE CLASS 10 (PN:TS64GSDXC10) [18] yes (needs more testing)

partly (needs more testing, I'll update it when I've used it another week)

no

partly (would need more testing)

16.1

still needs to be measured, at the beginning it was 16 too

16.1

0.5 (~16 for the first 64GB)

? After some time the system gives read/write errors. Works fine on a pc with linux with ext2/ext3.

My Linux computer can't read it, but that is probably the computer. First formatted it to ext2 while leaving 16MiB free at the beginning because it was like that when I got it. Had 16MB/s r/w. Then started to have problems after writing about 64GB to it, couldn't mount it, reformatted it, no change, reformatted it as Fat32, still no change, reformatted again as fat32, no problems so far but r/w speed is 0.5MB/s.

Zap 32GB 4 Zap Glider 32GB Class 4 [19] ? yes 16.6 4.6 ? Works fine