I am close to buying an N800, but I'm scared off by the complaints about SDHC cards getting fried by the interior and exterior card slots. I would want my N800 to gave 8 gigs of flash memory right from the start, and I would probably want to ramp up to 16 gigs soon, so these problems are a major concern. Any thoughts about this dilemma would be appreciated.

You won't get a clear answer. I think most people don't have problems.
But some are having problems... And we hope that Nokia will provide us a
solution (sooner or later). It isn't clear if this a software or hardware issue.
I would buy only one card and then test it in both slots with large
file transfers. If you don't have any problems ... buy a second card.

Read bug #1204 from comment #20 onwards and make up your own mind...

If you want my advice: don't use any expensive cards in the N800 for the time being, or alternatively restrict your usage to the internal slot which seems less likely to slay a card than the external slot.

As I understand it, the original n800-sdhc-kernel didn't produce these card destruction problems, that was the Nokia enhancement.

Is there anything to be gained by applying this kernel patch after flashing the 4.2007.26-8 firmware upgrade?

Also is there sufficient collective experience to suggest that some makes/types of cards are more prone to this damage than others.

I purchased a 4 GB SDHC card made by Sandisk. It is one of the ordinary "blue" cards, not one of the Ultra II's or anything fancy. I bought it for ~$40 at Best Buy. It has been working just fine in my N800's internal slot. I have used the included card reader to transfer several GB worth of data (Maemo Mapper stuff) to it thus far.

Yeah, I am still not clear on what kind of 8 GB SDHC card to get for the N800 and whether the N800 can even use most of the memory bandwidth, etc. There are all kinds of Ultras, class 2, class 6, different brands, etc. I have no idea which one to get. Most of them seem to be around $80 in the US. Getting a cheaper one would lessen the loss from the memory corruption risk.

Travis

It's difficult to say for sure, but you may be correct - Nokia have omitted some of the changes that went into the old SDHC patch, and the author of the old patch is putting together a new 4.2007 patched kernel for release soon.

If you look earlier in that bug, specifically comments 12 and 13, there appears to be evidence of SD cards being knackered by a previous firmware (doesn't say which, but most likely 3.2007). Since these are standard SD cards that are being knackered it's also likely these users were not using the SDHC patched kernel. I don't recall seing any reports of SDHC card destruction using the old patch, yet a disturbingly high number of such reports with the new firmware.

I wouldn't expect it to work to be honest, there are bound to be other kernel changes in the new firmware which won't be present in the old 3.2007 kernel. Best to wait until a new unofficial 4.2007 + SDHC patch becomes available.

There are a few reports of Transcend and SanDisk cards dying, but that could simply because they're quite popular - I own 4 Transcend SDHC Class 2 cards because they're cheap and quite fast, and all are OK so far. I also own one 4GB SanDisk SDHC Class 2 card but would not recommend SanDisk as they don't seem to have any support for high speed or wide data bus modes (basically, SanDisk SDHC cards suck on performance!)

I have two A-Data 8 GB SDHC cards. One just died on me. I got them from newegg.com for prety cheap. Like $118 delivered. It does happen that i use the n800 quite a bit, and could be that i wore it out. More likely that the cheap card wasn't manufactured to the highest standard.

In the mmc1 slot, the card would simply stop allowing writes, even though the filesystem was mounted as read/write. I swapped cards in the slots, and now the bad one wont even mount.

I will likely go with a better brand, and may look for a higher class card for better performance.

Another report of the dying SDHC cards:

Yesterday I had downloaded a good 200Mb of Maemo Mapper maps to the 8Gb Class 6 Transcend card in the external slot.

All was fine.

Then I fired up the RSS reader and dragged down 2x 30 - 40Mb podcasts from Technometria.

Up came Canola and the podcast started only to abruptly stop. A quick look in file manager shows the card as corrupted. A reboot then shows the card as not installed.

Today I bought a new USB card reader and low and behold the card had lost it's file table and needed reformatting. 30 minutes later (no quick format here) and the card is back and working in the N800.

So I tried the same downloads again, and sure enough as soon as Canola started playing a repeat performance of "The Card's Last Dance"

Never had a single problem pre.v4 firmware and I'm using the same build of canola.

Not technical enough to start working out what is actually causing the problem, but at a punt trying to write and/or read at speed from the card seem to kill it.

If I can get it working again, I'll try the internal slot next.

Okay, a quick reformat and the 8GB card in the internal slot this time...

If I write the files to the SD card via a USB card reader on a Windows XP machine, the N800 appears to be able to read them just fine.

If I transfer files from the other SD card (1GB) or internal memory to the SDHC card all goes fine.

If I try to download maps or podcasts from the internet on the N800 and write them to the SDHC it goes all wrong.

It appears that the write process gets all confused and trashes the file allocation table (?) as a quick format sees the card back up and running.

Anyone having the same behaviour?