A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

Hello people.

Does anyone have same trouble?

My A-Data 16Gb SDHC card drains all the battery in 24 hours when my N800 is sleeping in offline mode. The card is in internal slot.

The card was formatted with Panasonic SD formatter, then sfdisk'ed in two partitions (vfat + ext2 root), mkdosfs, mke2fs and root transfered on it and lots of software installed.

A new N800 with the new battery, OS2008 from Nokia site flashed in + Fanoush modified initfs and kernel. The metalayer_crawler, load_applet and such a things was killed and that have no sense. The tablet works fine with old 2Gb Transcend SD card from my camera and without any card works too.

I reformat the card with Panas. formatter again to empty state, boot form internal flash, try to unmount the SDHC from root file system to disable any access - there's no difference.

The card read/write speed is fast enough and keep all the files (music/video) good (no corruptions or visible IO errors).

The only things are: the 'df' free space calculation is ve-e-ery slow (about two seconds or more), high power consumption, full erase (or something like that) isn't supported by device (from Panas SD formatter report).

Any issue?

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

I have an A-DATA 8GB that is probably mostly similar, and I haven't noticed anything major - maybe a slight decline in battery life, but I still get several days standby, and several hours of solid use.

Are you sure it is your card causing the problem? Does it go away when you take the card out?

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

I have the same card and I get about 3 days in idle/offline.

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

Yes, the other card (2Gb usual SD) works about 4 days in idle/offline.

So I need some information from A-Data users to decide wether the card was incorrectly formatted and works wrong or it's broken in hardware and I must forget about it. (unfortunately I can't return it to the supplier)

houman, can you check how long the 'df' command in Xterm works with your card mounted? Do you have a standard kernel or modified one from Fanoush?

Do the Panasonic SD formatter perform 'full device erase' or something like that with 16Gb A-Data? I can't remember exactly the words, but mine says that the device doesn't support 'full erase' (or something like that).

Maybe It was wrong card reader? (Kingston FCR-ML)
Or SD clock in N800 too high?
I don't know what else to suppose...

Anyway, thanks for any information.

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

Run top, With 4 and 8GB SD's I've noticed that /usr/bin/metalayer-crawler goes ballistic trying to search for media. I just moved the file to one with some made up extension and gained all my batter life back. The metalayer-crawler process was sitting there using 80-90% CPU and slowing me to a crawl.

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

Which file did you mv? metalayercrawler?

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

That is the only meta thing that takes up cpu.

You can also move the file in rc2.d instead.

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

See my edit for the full path. (got to where my n800 was and corrected myself. ) But if yours looks like mine did ... top will show it chewing up CPU.

Additionally run

#> update-rc.d -f metalayer-crawler0 remove

to permanently shut it off on the next reboot (the proper way to remove it from the rc.X dirs) The problem is that just killing the process doesn't make it go away if you choose to avoid a reboot. You have to rename it and then kill the running process or else it keeps restarting itself.

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

I think it's not metalayer-crawler in my case because it's that I've disabled first in init and checked many times that there's no such process running. But I will check it again (maybe I'm wrong).

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

I have two 16GB installed in my N800. I thought that the battery was being drained unusually fast, but was soon to discover that my battery was actually old...

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

sorry, work was crazy for the past days, did not have a chance to check the device, will do so today.

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

Same here - with 2 16GB A-Data SDHC cards my battery life has been dramatically reduced - nearly dead in standby overnight. Dies completely if left on longer than that. A new battery helped some - only down by ~50% in standby overnight. I suspect that the stress on the battery killed the original one. Have started to try to remember to turn it off at the end of the day - a PITA.

Running OS2008 v. 51-3 from the internal card with fanoush's modified initrd for the custom boot menu - not a modified kernel. Should probably see what happens when booted from the flash - may be that running from the card makes a difference. Will try that and report back.

I have no metalayer-crawler in the process table. Have not disabled metalayer-crawler0 in init.d or rc?.d nor renamed anything.

Phil

Update: Tried leaving N800 booted from internal flash overnight. No difference - still down to <50% battery capacity.

Estimated battery time left
When idle: 2 days
When in use: 1 hour

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

I recently got an 8-gig A-Data card, and also have the battery drain issue (would normally last on standby for several days, but with the card in it drains completely in less than 24 hours). Even with the card freshly formatted, containing no data, I get the battery drain. Top shows virtually no activity, so it's not the metalayer-crawler issue.

Before I was using a Transcend 2-gig micro-SD in a SD converter card, and would get some reduced battery with that (about 3 days life in standby and light occasional usage).

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

I got a A-data 16gb in the external slot, no problems whatsoever with battery usage.
4 day's standby. N800 with OS2008 v. 51-2 and SDHC high speed patched kernel.
I don't have a internal card however

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

To me it starts to sound like there's something wrong with those cards which show battery drain. There shouldn't be any, when they're not actively transferring data. Get a warranty replacement maybe?

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

Also make sure that you don't have swap/virtual memory turned on. Additionally, if you're booting off the card instead of the internal flash that's like to cause the same issue. The problem is that normally when it goes into sleep the tablet shuts down power to the card slots; any time that you're actively doing something on the card (i.e. using it as memory storage, using it as a boot device, etc) the tablet CAN'T shutdown the card slot, so it has to keep it active and thus drains power much more quickly.

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

Just to add a quick update -- I was previously getting the power-drain within 24 hours issue with my a-data 8gb card. After upgrading to Diablo (the latest firmware), the battery meter is still showing 100% after 16 hours of idle (before it would be at least half drained by now).

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

make sure any applets etc that routinely probe the card (such as free space checkers) are disabled - this worked for me

Re: A-Data 16Gb SDHC drains the battery
 

Recently,I find when I copy some MP3 files to N800, The default Media Player can't update playlist automaticly,and have no these songs in Library-Music-songs,Finally,I find that's because I have renamed /usr/bin/metalayer-crawler
to metalayer-crawler.bak.
When I undo it ,the Media Player is OK.So metalayer-crawler is used for scanning
the media files in system,and it is very importmant if you using default media player.Otherwise you will make the playerlist manually.If you use other Player,such as Mediabox/Canola,then you can kill the metalayer-crawler process.