Are you a communist? /s
Jokes aside. I'd love to see this standardized and widely available with a document why SD cards needs to be formatted this way, but I think everyone is afraid that someone's patent or secret or something will be revealed, and its library form is probably, really a revenue stream for them.
Shortsighted, I may say.
Also, this tool exists to fix card errors at field and reduce support costs, not to advocate their superior jutsu of formatting. The latter is not the point.
The fundamental problem, I think, is that FOSS didn't really take off in Japan the way it did in US/EU, for some reason. There are tons of code-literate engineers but way less who would be sympathetic with developer community building, code sharing, licensing discussions, etc., that are more common in communities from US/EU.
I find these cultural differences very interesting. I wonder why it’s that way. I noticed some lower willingness to share work (and any form of bad news) in more competitive societies, but I’m unsure this would be the case.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Software developers are also not seen as "real" engineers there. They're just typing words into a computer, right?
You can of course "just program" the same way you can "just build" a car out of plywood and some electric motors, however the presence of an engineering mindset (and tools/resources) is what separates a fire hazard from a Ferrari.
On the one hand, I get that and I get that you might not want to take criticism etc on a small utility that you create...
However, on the other hand, if this such a pervasive issue as to merit an official "correct" implementation, then I would think you would want more implementations working correctly, so that your brand behaves more consistently, correctly, across impls.
I could've done it without AI (I've done it before) but it would've taken me 20x longer.
I didn't see that the first time around so this re-post was interesting, thanks! There's a bit of discussion in the other thread about the "protected area" - anyone got good links to the minutiae of that? How big is it, what tools exist to access it etc. ?
https://www.sdcard.org/developers/sd-standard-overview/conte...
However you can see from the parent comment:
> Success of mutual authentication enables host to access card protected area.
So it's something the memory control must make available after a handshake, and then I presume either some specific memory address or set of retrieval commands would follow.
As you mention, it also states this spec is now optional.
I know "modern" cards have no space, but if it's important to you, you can still use the full size adapters which should (all?) have the physical lock. Super glue that in place...
Setting up Linux to run from a read only filesystem only takes a handful of commands, but having a tool to automate it would be nice.
It seems to fix things where Windows File Explorer's formatter and other tools fail. A simple tool that does a really good job. It has even fixed some partition weirdness I've needed to deal with.
I had a wonky HIKSemi USB flash drive, which turned out to be partitioned in a very unaligned way, and neither the flash nor the controller liked that much. Doing it manually and making sure it's aligned (which gparted does automatically) converted it to a very dependable drive.
Seems weird it can be applied to bitlocker to go volumes.
The main difference seems to be stuff about block size and alignment.
>Technically speaking, the SD Memory Card Formatter optimizes the layout of data structures on a SD memory card in accordance with flash parameters defined by the SDA. This includes placing the partition at the correct offset for the internal flash layout of the card, properly aligning the FAT and the cluster heap (an area containing the file and directory data) to internal flash boundaries, and minimizing wear-leveling, while maximizing read/write performance.
>Manufacturers of small embedded devices most often expect a file system to be formatted to the above stated parameters, so they optimize their relatively simple system implementations based on the assumption that the file system is already optimized for the internal flash layout.
I don't know enough about flash memory to understand why SSDs don't have this issue. Presumably they use more advanced controllers that just hide all this
However, as at least some of the devices users will be Windows users, it does tend to limit the FS choices to FAT, exFAT or NTFS if the user expects to treat the card as removable storage to transfer files, like in a digital camera, so the issue is pretty much moot. Unless MS are still charging royalties on FAT and the device manufacturer wants to avoid those.
These days with people mainly using their phones, and the transfer of files being done over the air, allows device manufacturers more freedom with their SD card FS choice.
However, sometimes devices format these cards in slightly specific ways they like (sector sizes, partition offsets and like) so the cards work well with the devices.
My Sony A7-III has an intelligent way of testing cards without reading/writing extensive data and reporting whether the card can handle particular video bitrates. I think SD cards have some tricks we still don't know as consumers much.
Which IMO is where the whole "Its better to let the device format the card" came from. Because techs just got sick of trying to explain to less tech savvy users that "yes its possible to format the card in your computer, but just use the devices in built formatter handle it for you", because I know I told users that all the time back in the day, lol.
chrism238•5mo ago
ycombinatrix•5mo ago
Almondsetat•5mo ago
ycombinatrix•5mo ago
Almondsetat•5mo ago
ycombinatrix•5mo ago
robin_reala•5mo ago
Note: If you have a Mac with Apple silicon, e.g. M1, you might be asked to install Rosetta in order to open the SD Card Formatter.