I thought about posting this in the mobile development section, but hey it's more a general question and many of us have Android devices, and may have faced this problem.
I have happily been using 64gb SD / microSD cards on my PC and cameras for a while now, no problems. Now I have a few Android devices that I have tried this on, but I can't seem to get anything over 32 gb cards to work with my android devices. :angry:
I gather the 'problem' comes because up to 32gb (SDHC), the cards come formatted as FAT32, whereas above that (SDXC), they come formatted as exFAT, which Microsoft seems to own, so maybe hardware makers / OS providers have to pay Microsoft to have exFAT support? :mellow:
So after a bit of research online I read about using 3rd party programs to format the larger SD cards with FAT32 on a PC, with the idea that they should now read and work on both devices:
http://www.androidauthority.com/high-capacity-microsd-cards-android-gary-explains-690710/
http://gearnuke.com/use-64gb-bigger-microsd-cards-android-device-maxes-32gb/
However while the 64gb sd cards now 'appear' on the android devices, some of the files are missing, or maybe don't play.. The support seems to be broken, it is like only half the file system is being recognised, there doesn't seem any rhyme or reason as to whether some files work and some don't.
So I have 2 questions:
- Has anyone managed to get >32 gb cards to work PROPERLY with android (especially with FAT32)? If so, how? Why, (if FAT32 can handle more than 32GB), does Android not handle this properly?
- If this is not just me (and I don't think it is), what were the SD card standards people thinking? Could they not have standardized on something that was not patented and controlled? Surely it isn't rocket science to come up with an open file system?
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I have to say, this smacks of one. It may be that certain manufacturers are able to pay the exFAT 'tax', or cross licence patents, while others (on smaller margins) cannot. Whereas this whole situation could have been avoided by using an open file system standard. I would really love to hear that there are in fact valid tech reasons why the 32gb limit is somehow 'magic', and that there are no underhand dealings going on. :unsure:
The situation is even more dubious than that, because Google really don't want you to be using SD cards, so you are forced to store everything in the 'cloud' and pay them money and have them sift through your data (to target you with ads), so I wouldn't put it past them to purposefully sabotage SD card support in Android (they seem to go as far as leaving out SD card slots on their models to make this decision for you).