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Posts: 5,478 | Thanked: 5,222 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ St. Petersburg, FL
#213
Originally Posted by slha89 View Post
If I can't get N900 cheaper than 699,-, I'll wait for "N910" to have SDXC card support and Maemo 6.
It's like buying now a notebook without Express Card to upgrade to USB 3.0. I can't replace every year a phone and a notebook to sell it for half the price, because I need more space and/or faster ports.
With USB 3.0 und SDXC at the door, it's imho a bad time to buy something without this items. Look back SD -> SDHC and USB 1.1 -> 2.0
Congratulations! You've been duped by the flash card industry into believing SDXC is a compatibility-breaking release requiring additional hardware support.

The truth is, every Linux device that currently supports SDHC also support SDXC without issue. That is, of course, assuming you're using a reasonable filesystem like ext3 (as opposed to exFAT). The SDHC spec was artificially limited to 32GB by restricting the address space to only 16 of the 22 bits available.*

Originally Posted by Wikipedia
For the new SDHC high capacity card (2.0) implementation, 22 bits of the identification string are used to indicate the memory size in increments of 512 KBytes. Currently 16 of the 22 bits are allowed to be used, giving a maximum size of 32 GB. All SDHC 4-GB and larger cards must be 2.0 implementations. Two bits that were previously reserved and fixed at 0 are now used for identifying the type of card, 0=standard, 1=HC, 2=reserved, 3=reserved. Non-HC devices are not programmed to read this code and therefore cannot correctly read the identification of the card.
Thankfully, Linux ignores this artificial limit and has long been capable of addressing all 22 bits. What this means, is that the only encumbrance to using proper SDXC cards in current and future tablet devices (or, in fact, any current Linux device with SDHC support) is support for exFAT read/write. Which is on its way and only a software install away once provided.

So, no, there are no issues whatsoever with buying an SDHC-supporting Linux device now and using SDXC later. No more FUD, please.


*Which, of course, is because FAT becomes cumbersome past 32GB. Hopefully we can be rid of that blight upon the technology industry at some point.
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Ryan Abel

Last edited by GeneralAntilles; 2009-09-14 at 05:45. Reason: As I often seem to, forgot the asterisk on the footnote
 

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