50g freezes on SD card access

[Eric Rechlin]

Use a PC to format the card, not the calculator.

You can use either FAT32 or FAT16, but I recommend FAT16. Picking FAT16 will give larger cluster sizes, which means you can fit fewer files on the card (though the reduction in limit is not meaningful for any typical use), because each file will take more size, but it also reduces the number of clusters on the card, which avoids the slow-power-on issues with large cards.

As I recall, FAT32 will use 8 times as many clusters as FAT16 with the default Windows cluster size, so the power-on delay is 8 times longer (which is effectively a couple seconds for a 2 GB card with FAT32 vs imperceptible with FAT16, if I remember right). I do not remember how the calculator handles non-standard cluster sizes.

The free space won't be reported correctly in Filer if you have over a gigabyte of free space, which means only cards up to 1 GB are 100% perfectly supported. However, 2 GB cards otherwise work just fine. It's getting harder to find cards under 2 GB nowadays anyway. Don't try anything bigger; I heard rumors of some SD (not SDHC) cards existing in the 4 GB size, but I haven't seen any myself, so anything over 2 GB is almost certainly not going to be compatible with the 50g OS.

I believe the SD vs SDHC limit is in software, not hardware, however, so I think it is theoretically possible that something with its own SD card implementation like newRPL could support larger capacity SDHC (or maybe even SDXC) cards but I don't know whether that is realistic.