SD Card recommendations

[xenon 3]

What SD Cards are compatible with the Pro1-X ?  I was thinking of buying 1 or 2Tb of storage but with so many varieties on the market, it's not clear what is compatible.

[Hook 2,907]

Any microSD card should be compatible.  I tend to get Sandisk (currently 256 GB) and I stick to Ultra rather than Extreme because the Pro1 doesn't really get the benefit that some high end DSLRs might. Frankly, as long as it is a Class 10, you should be fine. 

But I'm no expert.  Others here are likely to know more.

[ddark-il 100]

Keep in mind that you'll need to format it with FAT32.  exFAT is not supported.
If you plan to switch the card between camera and a phone, probably you'll be stuck because of lack of exFAT support.

If your use case is only with the phone - take the cheapest one (from reputable Brand/Store, there are many fake cards from China)

[Rob. S. 1,634]

Just to add to what already was said – In a heavily used smartphone, depending on what you use the card for, it might make sense to make sure the card (i.e. the card's controller) does wear levelling. I'm not sure whether there still are cards available which don't, but I already managed to quickly wear down two cheaper, smaller cards (of renowned brands, though) which I used as the main storage in a Raspberry Pi. That said, I haven't had a defective card in any of my Android devices yet.

[claude0001 1,271]

2 hours ago, toast said:

Also, does the FAT32-only apply to all available ROMs, or only stock Android?

I do not know about stock Android, but on LIneageOS (16.0) I have two partitions on my SD-card: one formated as ext4 and one as ext3, and both just work. I did the formatting externally using a PC. The same card can also be accessed via an external (USB) card reader connected to the Pro1, so this is independent of the built-in reader. At least on the low level, I think the kernel supports all filesystems it is aware of, irrespective of the specific block device.

Of course, how Android treats a partition on the high-level may be a different story. On my Lineage 16 (Android 9), I can use my ext3/4 SD partitions normally from standard Android apps once I identified them as "portable storage" upon first detection. However, this may have changed in later versions.

As for the I/O-performance of the reader, I do not know, neither for my Pro1 nor for the Pro1X.

[claude0001 1,271]

1 hour ago, toast said:

was hoping to format it to ext4 as well

Be aware that, as part of its security concept, Android runs every app under a different UID. As a consequence, with an ext4 FS, data sharing across apps can be difficult unless they use the common GIDs (media_rw, etc.) foreseen to that effect. In the past, many people used FAT-formatted SD-cards to circumvent that restriction, taking advantage of the fact that FAT simply does not know about UNIX file permissions. I do not know if this affects your use case(s).

[kashif 350]

Just to put my input, i am using !TB Samsung sd card, and a 500GB Samsung sd card.

Both are working fine.

[Rob. S. 1,634]

20 hours ago, toast said:

should I buy a slow and cheap or a fast and slightly less cheap SD card

15 hours ago, claude0001 said:

Be aware that, as part of its security concept, Android runs every app under a different UID

For me, my attempt to use ext4 has caused serious trouble for some regular use cases, and some apps just didn't work anymore with their data configured to be stored on the SD card. 

Generally, and since one 512 MB card (Kingston "Canvas Go! Plus") actually did fail for me already, I'm now going for sensibly fast (and thus not the cheapest) Samsung or Sandisk cards...

 

[JoeF 11]

I just got a Sandisk 512G micro SD. No need to format it beforehand, Android does that for you when you insert it.

[claude0001 1,271]

I've had a SanDisk eXtreme 256 GB in my Pro1 (no X) since day 1. My impression is that, while isolated read or write access is OK, random access cannot be compared to an ssd or even a magnetic hdd, no matter what you are being told. I learned this the hard way after installing my GNU/Linux OS on my SD-card (in an effort to reduce wear of the bulit-in memory). Some benchmarks from my system:

Pure writing:

dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=512k count=1k
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB, 512 MiB) copied, 8.25252 s, 65.1 MB/s

Pure reading:

dd if=test.dat of=/dev/null
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB, 512 MiB) copied, 6.70954 s, 80.0 MB/s

Simultaneous read-and write:

dd if=test.dat of=test2.dat
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
536870912 bytes (537 MB, 512 MiB) copied, 39.5167 s, 13.6 MB/s

On a 13-year-old Thinkpad T400 with a random SSD, the respective readbacks are

Quote

134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 0.373087 s, 360 MB/s     # write
[...]
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 0.483218 s, 278 MB/s     # read
[...]
134217728 bytes (134 MB) copied, 1.38858 s, 96.7 MB/s      # read-write

[EskeRahn 5,399]

7 hours ago, claude0001 said:

On a 13-year-old Thinkpad T400 with a random SSD, the respective readbacks are

Could be interesting with the test performed on the same (type of) SD in a/the PC. And perhaps another phone, to see if the limit is on the device, the card or the OS doing a poor job.

[claude0001 1,271]

13 hours ago, EskeRahn said:

Could be interesting with the test performed on the same (type of) SD in a/the PC

Unfortunately, I have no second specimen of this (quite expensive) type.

Now, I could insert my Pro1 card into the laptop and test. However, considering that I routinely hurt at least two of my fingernails when extracting the Pro1's <censored> SD/SIM holder, and subsequently always wonder whether I haven't broken the puny little thing for good now, I prefer not to, sorry. 🙂

[brunoais 317]

2 hours ago, claude0001 said:

I routinely hurt at least two of my fingernails when extracting the Pro1's <censored> SD/SIM

For me, it just works easily. And I'm also someone with small nails.

On other news: debut of my hand on video!!!

Edited August 23, 2022 by brunoais

[Tsunero 208]

Probably the incorrect topic to ask but maybe it's relevant here a bit as well. Recently I got a new 128GB pendrive which has both usb 3.2 and usb c. I plugged it into my Pro1 but it can't read it no matter the file system (it is recognized at least). So I am wondering if this is an android 9 limitation or if it would work on newer version / a different OS.

Works fine on PC.

 

Edit: Nevermind, FAT32 formatting works if I do it with the phone itself. lol

Too bad it doesn't support NTFS.

Edited September 10, 2022 by Tsunero

[EskeRahn 5,399]

27 minutes ago, Tsunero said:

Probably the incorrect topic

(moved your post over here)

[claude0001 1,271]

On 9/10/2022 at 5:08 PM, Tsunero said:

Nevermind, FAT32 formatting works if I do it with the phone itself.

The Pro1's kernel supports vfat ("FAT32"), msdos ("FAT16"), ext2/3/4, and f2fs.

At least for FAT32, ext3 and ext4, cards can be read also when partitioned and formatted on my (Linux) PC. Even with multiple partitions on the card, Android (Lineage) can access them all. I never tested f2fs.

Of course, you should understand the implications of a UID-aware filesystem, before using something like ext. The same would hold for NTFS, where Unix-UIDs would need to be mapped to NT-UIDs in some way.

Edited September 13, 2022 by claude0001