1. Author: shaneguide Date: 12/26/2008 08:58 AM Reply
OK I admit, I am not the most computer smart person. Got my girlfriend a digital picture frame for Christmas and was attempting to load our vacation pics onto a 2 gig SD card. The card will only allow me to load about 1/10 of its capacity.
Any ideas why?
thank you too much
shane
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I deal with this issue on PocketPCs all the time.
There are 2 possibilities for this: the hardware being used to WRITE to the card, and the hardware that allows you to READ from the card.
Many devices that use SD cards have a limit to the amount of space they can address. You can purchase as big an SD card as you want, but the limitation of the hardware defines how much you can put or get from one of these mobile storage devices.
If you're using PC software supplied by the people who manufactured the picture frame gizmo, their software may intentionally limit the number of pictures on the card that the picture frame software/hardware can address.
There is also the potential issue that these cards use FAT32 as a disk management system, which harkens back to the days of Microsoft DOS. FAT32, if I remember correctly, limited you to about 512 MB (maybe more depending on specific disk-related conditions).
A third problem may be that the card is defective. In my experience, SecureDigital cards are less reliab less than Compact Flash cards. Much of the software I write either resides on an SD / CF card, or uses said devices for storing data. With a specific user of one of my applications, they saw something like a 20% higher failure rate with SD cards. They are made cheaply, which explains whay they are often less expensive than CF cards.
Often times a defective SD card can be "fixed" by reformatting the card, and doing a CHKDSK on it (from the command prompt on your computer). The easier method is to just buy a new card.
If we're talking a brand-new, just out of the box 2 GB SD card, the last thing I would assume that the card is bad. This is, indeed, a rarity.