HP 50g & SD Cards: Performance, Format, Notes

[matthiaspaul]

(07-15-2016 08:21 AM)JDW Wrote:  1. Does the SD card speed matter? Is there any discernible speed difference between the cheapest SD card available versus a fast card?

Inserted into the calculator, the card's speed doesn't matter, but speed counts when you insert the card into a card reader and make bulk transfers of files to or from the card (although, in practise, this is only an issue with larger cards).

It is, however, important to note that the calculator only supports SDSC and MMC cards (as well as miniSD / microSD / TransFlash with adapter). SDHC and SDXC (and their mini and micro variants) are not supported by the calculator.

Quote:I am thinking about getting a 1GB card.

You can use cards up to 2 GB, but cards larger than 1 GB need to be formatted externally and sizes larger 1 GB wouldn't be displayed correctly by the calculator (this is a cosmetical problem only, the calculator will still handle them correctly).

(If you'd find one of those rare non-standard SDSC cards with more than 2 GB, there's a slight chance that cards up to 4 GB could be used as well - I never tried and it very much depends on the firmware implementation. Does someone know if the firmware can handle those cards with 2 to 4 GB as well? And does the firmware support non-standard 64 KB clusters, as would be required if FAT16B rather than FAT32 should be used for such larger volumes?)

Quote:2. The HP 50g User's Guide says, "The HP 50g will only work with cards in the FAT16 or FAT32 format." but this HP Forum thread says, "If you place a new SD card into the HP 50g and it is not recognized, it should probably be reformatted under FAT16." This appears to be conflicting information. What is correct?

The HP 50g (at least with firmware 2.15, probably also 2.16) supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT16B and FAT32. FAT32 was not supported by firmware 1.xx, and some early firmware 2.xx left out support for FAT12 until it was retrofitted, so if the calculator comes with a really old firmware you might initially need a card formatted as FAT16 or FAT16B to upgrade the firmware.

The calculator ignores VFAT LFNs as well, so only the 8.3 SFNs are used.

(For completeness: The calculator neither supports FAT32+, FAT32B nor exFAT, but this is a non-issue here as the largest file and volume sizes supported by the calculator are 2 GB (or possibly 4 GB, see above), anyway.)

Greetings,

Matthias

EDIT: I should have pressed the refresh button before posting - this was already answered half a day ago... ;-)