One of the most frequently asked questions we here in Customer Care at V.I.O. is when will we be able to use larger capacity cards. Currently the POV.1 can only use SD cards and not SDHC cards. What is the difference between the two? I will look into this after the jump.

The SD (secure Digital) card is a small FLASH based card that is about 32mm x 24mm in size and about 2mm thick. The memory size of the SD card ranges from 8MB to 2GB officially. While there are 4GB cards available as SD cards, they are technically SDHC cards.

The reason the POV.1 can only use the SD card, and cannot use the larger cards is because of the file system used by the POV.1. The file system used on SD cards and the POV.1 is FAT16, which has a maximum partition size of 2GB. While it is possible to work around this usually it is done via the computer, which already has more memory and processing power than the POV.1. We have been informed of some tricks that can be used to allow the POV.1 to use 4GB SDHC cards, but that has not been tested or approved. This “4GB work around” which is mentioned in the FAQ calls for the card to be formatted using the FAT16 file system and 64KB cluster sizes. While this will allow the POV.1 to use 4GB cards, V.I.O. does not currently support this workaround. Also not that the process for doing this so far only works on a Windows computer. (Sorry Mac users)

The new SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) allows for faster transfer speeds and larger capacities than the SD format. While both cards use the same physical card layout, the SDHC cards is formatted with a file system called FAT32. FAT32 allows for larger file sizes, up to 4GB, and physical disk sizes of up to 2TB (2,000GB). The SD Association’s SDHC guidelines currently limit the size of SDHC cards to 32GB for this generation.

Since the POV.1 uses a FAT16 file system it cannot “see” the larger sizes easily. We are working on improving the POV.1 via a firmware update, and we hope to expand the size limit to 8GB in the near future (by November). While in theory this switch to FAT 32 should allow for the POV.1 to use the 16GB cards, this has not yet been tested. Due to the size and other limits placed upon the POV.1 we cannot simply switch to FAT32 to unlock the larger file sizes. We originally thought we would need to change the hardware of the POV.1 in order to use the SDHC cards, but that problem has been solved and all POV.1 units should be able to upgrade to the upcoming firmware.

I hope this has been informative, and as always if you have any questions please feel free to call or e-mail us at anytime

Ian M

Customer Care Team

V.I.O. Inc.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sd_card

http://www.sdcard.org/home

http://www.lexar.com/

http://www.sandisk.com/

http://community.vio-pov.com/customercare/2008/08/19/sd-cards-a-recommendation/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat16