Status of SD card compatibility - What should I buy?

[selsinork]

nicholfd said:


An SD card is not just an SD card…


Certainly seems that way.


(anyone seen confirmed reports that Class 6 works?)


Yes, I have two class 6 cards that I can confirm work in a production Pi with latest debian and arch images:





they"re even documented on the wiki

[dscott]

And I've got the 16GB version of that very same Sandisk card (the packaging is identical apart from it says "16" instead of "4") and I can't get it to work!

How crazy is that!

[selsinork]

dscott said:


And I've got the 16GB version of that very same Sandisk card (the packaging is identical apart from it says "16" instead of "4") and I can't get it to work!

How crazy is that!


Not crazy at all. Mine says Made in China

also, on the wiki, SanDisk seem to be leading the problem cards list which may be a clue.

[Retroman]

Just a quick post to confirm that I'm using the below SanDisk Extreme 30MB/s Class 10 8GB SD card and it works great on my Rasp Pi.

I've using the latest Debian image from the other day and it works perfectly on it as did the last version,as does Arch. I was using a very old and slow SD card before I tried this and the performance increase is fairly dramatic since I swapped cards.



.

[rew]

rmm200 said:


I would welcome someone's comments here that they have tried micro SD cards and that they work.


I have a probably-fake- sandisk mIcroSD with a probably-fake sandisk adapter.

This works. On the other hand, my SD card no longer gets good exercise, because I Just boot, and run from NFS from then on.

My transcend class 10 works too.

On the other hand, before I got the NFS working, I did have the mmc timeout messages. Other than slowing things down a bit, no harm done. I would expect a kernel fix for this in the near future, so I wouldn't go around buying other cards because of a software problem.

This forum software is getting anoying. It asks me to do math. And In fact I've always been pretty good at math. In my book 6+10 equals 16. But according to the forum software "math is wrong".

[Chris.Rowland]

I'm getting the impression that with the current Debian distribution the problems is more with large SD cards than with the class.

Retroman reports that an 8Gb card works, I think the other messages I've seen saying they work are for 2, 4 or 8GB cards. I'm not sure what size rew is using but I predict that it's 8GB or less.

Dscott's 16G class 6 cards doesn't work, I suggest that the problem isn't the class but the size.

Does anyone have an example of a card that's larger than 8G working?

Btw I don`t see the need for a huge SD card. I`d be more inclined to have a fairly small OS card with any large storage requirements on a USB stick.  That way when the OS changes – and at present we can expect it to do so frequently – there`s much less that needs to be changed.

[Blunderbuss]

I've got the latest Debian image running on a 32 GB class 10 Transcend card without issue. I've also got my 32 GB microSD Samsung card with SD adapter booting Arch Linux, but so far I seem stuck unable to log in (it just times out), and I haven't licked that yet.

[Chris.Rowland]

My hypothesis has been falsified - we're doing SCIENCE!!!

Does the fix to the kernel code only apply to the latest Debian code but not to the Arch code?

[Blunderbuss]

Chris Rowland said:


My hypothesis has been falsified - we're doing SCIENCE!!!

Does the fix to the kernel code only apply to the latest Debian code but not to the Arch code?


The opposite seemed true on my Samsung 32 GB MicroSDHC + Adapter card. Arch worked, though VERY VERY slowly, and I got the typical error message with Debian.

[selsinork]

Some more data and I"ve added these to the wiki as well:

all tested with debian6-19-04-2012.img

Transcend 8GB class 10 (TS8GSDHC10) works

http://www.mymemory.co.uk/SDHC.....-Class-10-

MyMemory 8G class 10 (MYMESDH8G10) works

http://www.mymemory.co.uk/SDHC.....--Class-10

Panasonic RP-SDU08GD1K problem, gives mmc0: timeout waiting for hardware interrupt

http://www.mymemory.co.uk/SDHC.....--Class-10

I'll try Arch on the Panasonic to see if that makes a difference

more images in the galleries here http://selsinork.imgur.com if you're interested

[gordon@drogon.net]

I had an issue with an SD card recently that I thought was down to me crashing the Pi when fiddling with graphics, but it seems the card is fine and it's the latest Debian that isn't...

So under the 2nd Debian release it was fine, but when I tried the latest one it wasn't so fine (but the other, slower SD cards seem OK). My original SD card is a Transcend Class 6 card (4GB).  It boots, but then I see lots and lots of ext4 filesystem errors )-:

So I'm a little irritated that it used to work and now doesn't...

Do we know what changed, what patches to the kernel there are, etc. etc. etc. ?

Currently using Kingston Class 4, 4GB micro SDs in an adapter - seems fine, but slow.

Cheers,

Gordon

[nick123]

i havent got my raspberry pi yet, its on order but ive been buying bits for it already. i bought a transcend 16gb class 10 SD card this was bought from a online shop (NOT ebay) and the SD card turned out to be FAKE, i got my money back on the the card but im wondering if the inconsistency with the testing of SD cards is down to the huge number of fake SD cards on the market.

im guess there are are lots of people who have fake cards and dont even know it, my sd card appeared to work fine it was just dog slow.

i am going to buy one of the tested 8gb transcend SD cards in the link above.

[SN]

i'd avoid ebay if poss (though mymemory on there are excellent) and try play.com - they always have deals on cards

The other thing I'm doing is not going too big to start with - sticking to 4Gb cards - you are going to want to keep backup image copies on a laptop/pc for restore purposes or doing some config control and you fairly quickly eat up HD space and spend hours waiting for copies to happen if you go too big - just my opinion based on playing 2Gb images only at this point (which is r-day minus 13)

[dscott]

After my previous disappointing experiences with several Sandisk cards, I can confirm the cheap-as-chips MyMemory 8GB Class 10 cards selsinork mentioned a couple of posts back work flawlessly. I've bought 3 of these now and each one has worked with no problems.

[selsinork]

nick123 said:


but im wondering if the inconsistency with the testing of SD cards is down to the huge number of fake SD cards on the market.


wouldn't surprise me in the slightest


im guess there are are lots of people who have fake cards and dont even know it, my sd card appeared to work fine it was just dog slow.



I had a 16G supposedly class 4 card branded as coming from a very big PC manufacturer that would only give about 500kB/s read/write. Worked enough to be somewhat useable, but with various messages in the kernel log.

The problem is that the identifiers on the cards are mainly just a removable sticky label and a usually meaningless number on the back. So how is anyone supposed to be able to tell with any certainty which ones are fake ?

I'd started posting photos for exactly that reason - you can at least compare a known working one with the one you have.. if it looks different maybe that helps with why it doesn't work.

But probably more interesting is the probability that you get a fake card that works fine where the real version of that card doesn't...

[rmm200]

Most (all?) reported fake SD cards are a cheap card pretending to be a more expensive one. Typically a 4GB Sandisk card reporting it is a 16GB Sandisk card. You normally would never know until you exceeded the real 4GB data limit.

Google "fake SDCard".

[woodinblack]

I would add the status of mine. I have a transcend 4GB SDHC4 card that the wiki says is fine, and it will only boot if the Pi has previously booted off a previous card, a 2GB kingston card that will boot 4 times out of 5, and a 16GB kingston that works every time.

[adlambert]

I am using a Kingston 8GB Class 4 SD card from Amazon Marketplace, cost just £3. It's working very well.

[Usman55]

Hello guys,

I'll give my introduction later but right now, check out this card: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISA.....368wt_1037 I found it on eBay. The item is from a Top-Rated Seller, so it should be of high quality. It's price is extremely inexpensive relative to others I've seen. Will it work will the Raspberry Pi? If so, how good will it be? I've heard (and read) that classes don't make much difference. I also saw an article comparing many cards and Transcend proved to be the best regardless the class.

Thanks.

[woodinblack]

Hi us an, nice advert!

No, I wouldn"t buy there, too much "no contact" in bad feedback, and as I posted two above you, my transcend doesn"t work.
Speed is also very important so what "you read" was wrong.

Hope that helps

[Usman55]

Thanks for your reply but I wasn't advertising, I was asking if it would work cuz I was willing to buy one.

[zag]

Thanks for the Transcend link, I've ordered a 16gb Class 10 to see if it works.

I also updated the wiki with my current Sandisk 8gb Class 4

http://elinux.org/RPi_Performa.....ce#SD_card

Quite disapointing results to be honest.

[Usman55]

Can anyone test the link I posted?

[mtx512]

Thanks for the Transcend link, I"ve ordered a 16gb Class 10 to see if it works.

I also updated the wiki with my current Sandisk 8gb Class 4

http://elinux.org/RPi_Performa.....ce#SD_card

Quite disapointing results to be honest.

[Feakster]

nicholfd said:


I am ready to buy a few SD cards (thinking 8GB) for my ordered RaspberryPi.

I have read several posts/discussions regarding SD card compatibility.  From ALL of the information, it is not clear exactly what is working and what is not.  There was one post (I believe from Liz) to refer to the WiKi that there would be a SD compatibility chart - I can find no compatibility chart on the WiKi.

I want to buy Class 10 cards (I can't bring myself to by old, slow hardware... ;^) ), but have seen posts that suggests (doesn't confirm) these are not compatible.  Other posts are unclear.

Any pointers to solid information would be much appreciated.

Thanks.


I've got a 16Gb class 10 SDHC Sandisk Extreme. Supposed transfer speeds of 45MB/s. Sadly though, I can confirm that it doesn't work... Hangs on the loading phase. You never even get to login.

Next step, attempt to boot from SD card, with the root partition on the USB stick.