64GB Memory Card

[jl_678]

Hi,

I have one of these teed up and ready for the arrival of my Pine64+ 2GB.  However, I have one question.  My Raspberry Pi's have a difficult time support 64GB cards and require filesystem complexity to set them up.  It is for this reason that I only use 32GB cards on my Pis.

So, my question is a simple one.  If I use a 64GB card in my Pine64 can I access it as one (large) storage volume?  If this is an issue, I could use a 32GB card because I have one of those around as well.

Thank you!

[tllim]

Hi,

I have one of these teed up and ready for the arrival of my Pine64+ 2GB.  However, I have one question.  My Raspberry Pi's have a difficult time support 64GB cards and require filesystem complexity to set them up.  It is for this reason that I only use 32GB cards on my Pis.

So, my question is a simple one.  If I use a 64GB card in my Pine64 can I access it as one (large) storage volume?  If this is an issue, I could use a 32GB card because I have one of those around as well.

Thank you!

We have try up to 128GB on both SanDisk and Samsung brands and works well. I just ordered 200GB SanDisk microSD and waiting for Amazon shipment, once received I will post my test result.

[jl_678]

Great. Thank you!

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

[dav3yb]

Any updates on the larger SD cards? I'll be ordering myself one soon, seeing as how my pine arrived today!

[tllim]

Any updates on the larger SD cards?  I'll be ordering myself one soon, seeing as how my pine arrived today!

The largest microSD card capacity available is 200GB from SanDisk. I have tested and works well. However, please watch out for fake microSD card even some selling at Amazon.

[peterb]

I am running the Samsung 64GB EVO+ and its running fine on my 2GB Pine64.

[tkaiser]

I am running the Samsung 64GB EVO+ and its running fine on my 2GB Pine64.

The good news: with Pine64/Pine64+ there's no need to spend the extra cash for the EVO+ since EVO performs identical (and is clearly the 'bang for the buck' champion): http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...etlastpost

The bad news: Buying branded cards of this size or even larger increases the risk to get fake cards a lot: http://www.happybison.com/reviews/how-to...sd-card-8/ (therefore always test cards directly after purchase, all 3 suitable tools are linked to in the article)

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My Raspberry Pi's have a difficult time support 64GB cards and require filesystem complexity to set them up.

That has a simple reason: all Raspberry Pi boot differently compared to any other SBC out there (the latter use u-boot or UEFI). On Raspberries the VideoCore GPU starts the boot process, does the hardware initialisation and then hands over to the ARM core(s). The VideoCore GPU is old and somewhat limited and needs a FAT/FAT32 formatted 1st partition to read config.txt and binary BLOBs from, otherwise the RPi will never start and seems bricked.

Then there exist different SD card standards. The older SDSC/SDHC standards (up to 32 GB) and the newer SDXC. 64GB cards or larger are always SDXC and since the SD card associtation allows these cards only to be sold preformatted as exFAT the RPi is not able to boot from. That's the whole story and therefore RPi foundation tells you to use 'SD Formatter' with SDXC cards when you want to use them with any RPi (which is not entirely true either since this is only required for the multi-boot NOOBS solution but anyway). They tell you to use SD Formatter always since there also exist 32GB SDXC cards (pre-formatted with exFAT then).

There is no such limitation with almost any other SBC out there (same applies to the use of SD Formatter -- it's absolutely useless to 'format' a card when you burn an image on it one step later since then the partition table gets overwritten anyway). The A64 SoC used on Pine64/Pine64+ implements SDXC so you can use any available SDXC card without problems (as long as you manage to get a genuine card and not a fake/counterfeit card). Please be aware that the higher speed modes are not available with Pine64 and that you should get a card that shows high random I/O performance instead of choosing the highest 'speed class'.

[SkimMilk]

The good news: with Pine64/Pine64+ there's no need to spend the extra cash for the EVO+ since EVO performs identical (and is clearly the 'bang for the buck' champion): http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...etlastpost

Hi tkaiser, do you know the IO limitation on the microSD slot?
I can't seem to find this info on the wiki.

I just bought an EVO+ and was thinking of using it on the Pine but if it has low IO, then I will use this card in my phone and use my phone's EVO on the Pine instead.

PS: I ran CrystalDiskMark on the 2 cards via a usb3 card reader. Results show that reading from EVO+ is almost twice as fast compared to the EVO. (45MB/s vs 87MB/s for sequential reads)

[tkaiser]

The good news: with Pine64/Pine64+ there's no need to spend the extra cash for the EVO+ since EVO performs identical (and is clearly the 'bang for the buck' champion): http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...etlastpost

Hi tkaiser, do you know the IO limitation on the microSD slot?
I can't seem to find this info on the wiki.

It's written in the aforementioned article. Pine64 unfortunately only implements the slowest SDIO mode (4 bit @ 50 MHz --> 22/23 MB/s max) so all performance numbers listed there are valid for Pine64 too. So while EVO+ shows twice that much sequential read speed compared to an EVO when used on a host capable of negotiating the higher speed modes it doesn't matter at all when used together with Pine64.

This is all well known since the beginning and this is not the 1st discussion of this topic -- see for example http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?t...599#pid599 

And why should the Pine64 folks mention that in their FAQ or their wiki ("Hey, we could've implement fast storage but did not!")? 

The wiki is a whole mess in its current state anyway (eg. only listing Linux OS images that are outdated or otherwise weird and not pointing people to the good ones made by the original developer longsleep)

[jl_678]

@tkaiser, thank you for Raspberry Pi memory card clarification. I never understood why larger cards were problematic and now I do!