
This is used as reserve (if the controller detects bad sectors, then reserve sectors are mapped in) and to allow somewhat ok-ish write performance when the card gets full. Regarding 'reserve sectors' and overprovisioning: If a card claims it's n bytes in capacity it has internally a larger capacity. Other usesīesides quickly wiping out data for privacy, supposedly blkdiscard, similar to fstrim for an SSD, will improve wear-leveling and make some SD cards generally run a little bit faster.

Hopefully someday Linux will allow blkdiscard to be run on removable devices without requiring root privileges which would make it much less dangerous. Unfortunately, using -force means that all checks, including if the drive is in use, are disabled. The current implementation requires the -f, -force option if the drive is already formatted, which is (almost) always going to be the case since SD cards come pre-formatted.

That would be a nice safety feature, but it is not true as of this writing.

The manpage claims that, to be safe, it will only work if the drive isn't already mounted. You better be sure that you are pointing it at the right device and then double-check again. Since blkdiscard must be run as root, it can easily destroy all of your data. If you do not have a device that can speak directly to the low-level SD card, it is possible to build one out of an Arduino and run SDFormatter.ino. The difference is that kernel needs to have access to the low-level MMC subsystem, which USB abstracts away as a generic "mass storage" device. Note that while this works on my laptop and Raspberry Pi, it would not work on a USB SD card reader. z, -zero zero-fill blocks rather than discard. Use -s if you wish to be a little more secure and force garbage collected blocks to also be erased. As has been pointed out elsewhere, a normal CMD38 will make some blocks appear empty, but leave others plainly visible due to garbage collection. This calls the Linux BLKDISCARD ioctl, which in turn passes CMD38, the same as SD Memory Card Formatter. Even my terrific USB-serial converters fall over now and then, something the dedicated ports never do.To quickly erase an entire SD card, you can use the blkdiscard (8) command. The saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", seems to have evolved into "Let's constantly change things and create endless problems for some specialised end users, that they never had a while back". It seems that makers only consider the "latest and greatest", conveniently forgetting that a lot of the world still needs a facility that was in very common use only a few years ago.
#Sdcard formatter fail serial#
In some ways it is the same as modern computers not having onboard serial ports. But try and buy one these days and it is not possible, so my method of doing images needs some size "fiddling" each time I need to do one. Like Kratmel, I have 16Mb CF cards that I still use for some things. The suite needs to be changed to accommodate what a user might encounter through buying an easily sourced, current production type card. At present it is easily done, but perhaps in the future it might become harder as card systems evolve.Īlex, we're not insulting you here, just pointing out an issue that is only going to get worse. For ages I have used partition manager programs to manipulate big cards to be smaller with various Fat formats. Kratmel is correct in saying about bigger sizes, reinforcing what I was saying about "off the shelf card sizes are getting bigger all the time, with smaller ones that used to be big now not even being available". It still happens occasionally and I stil haven't figured it out. I asked about the ability for the PLC to format the card ages ago, when the corruption of DTs issue arose for me. So you clearly can see Unitronics PLCs advantages of SD cards use.

MC502 supporting 2 GB and ABB recommends to use SD cards, supplied by ABB.Īllen-Bradley recommends to use only Allen-Bradley SAD cards 1GB or 2GB capacity, formatted to FAT16 file system.
#Sdcard formatter fail windows#
If SIMATIC memory card is reformatted by Windows formatting program, CPU will not be able to use this reformatted memory card.Īt present, S7-1200 still cannot help the memory card realize such advanced functions as recipe and data archiving.ĪBB AC500 supporting 512 MB SD cards in FAT16 format (SD card may be 2 GB formatted to FAT16, and MUST BE SLOW). S7-1200 CPU only supports the memory cards that have been preformatted by Siemens manufacturer, whose order numbers are shown in the table below:
