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Help 32 GB Micro SDHC card reporting only 7.41 GB!

OwlHoot

Lurker
May 7, 2011
1
0
After setting up my new HTC Desire HD today with a 32 Gbyte Micro SDHC card (AKA SD Card), the phone reports only 7.41 GB!

I then put the card in a USB card holder, and slow-formatted it on my PC, using the excellent Panasonic SD Card formatter available at SD Formatter 3.0 for SD/SDHC/SDXC - SD Association and it happily formatted and initialized a 32 MB FAT32 partition. So there's no way the card is one of those low-quality rip-offs that have plagued some people.

Any ideas? I've heard Android 2.2, which the phone is on, has problems accessing SD cards larger than 8 GB which, coincidently, is about 7.41!

Also, lots of people, on various phones, have had file corruption problems with large capacity SD cards. (See long thread of woe, which stretches from 2008 until last week, at Issue 2500 - android - SD card corruption - Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project - Google Project Hosting )

So I hesitate to use it if Android can't even correctly decide how much free space there is!
 
When I first got my DHD the first thing I did was buy a 32gb card. I brought a cheap one of eBay that turned out to be a fake. Then I brought a Kingston card that worked perfectly well in a PC, but as soon as put it into my phone with music & photos etc. on it, the most of the data would disappear, but it did regonize it as a 32gb card.

In the end I brought a Sandisk card from Amazon & I've never had a problem with it. Its a Class 6 with good read/write speed.

By the way, try not to format flash memory cards as this can reduce their life span quite drastically.

Hope this helps!:)
 
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Any ideas why A new genuine SanDisk 32GB micro SD card reads as 29.71GB in my DHD?

Once properly formatted, you'll always lose a certain amount of data in any disk drive. The space you're not getting is taken up by the File Allocation Tables. Losing about 2GB from 32 looks about right.

Some Manufacturers will also exaggerate the size of the drives/cards etc. To the normal man on the street, 1MB = 1000KB, but in reality, 1MB = 1024KB. Using those maths, 1GB = 1,000,000 when in truth 1GB is actually 1,048,576 KB. It's not much, but it does add up the more space you add. Manufacturers will say a drive/card has 32,000,000KB which, is technically correct as being 32GB.
 
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I guess, based on previous responses, that El Presidente has it right. I purchased a Transcend class 4 32 GB microSD card from Amazon, and installed it yesterday. It has consistantly showed a total space of 29.71 GB. In addition, I've taken only 1 or 2 snapshots and downloaded about 215 songs since installing this card, and it currently shows 28.84 GB of available space remaining. Therefore, those 215 tunes or so plus a couple of photos took up 0.87 GB, which seems about right to me.
 
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