Centro memory card limitations

I bought a SanDisk 8 GB micro SDHC card for my centro. The salesman told me it would work even though my centro docs say I can use up to a 4 GB card. When I look at the card info on my centro it shows 3686.5 MG. Can I get the full benefit of this card on the centro or should I take it back and get a 4 GB card?

The salesman just didn't know what he was talking about. Palm's usually pretty good about stating the specs accurately.

Palm OS Garnet basically has a limitation that causes it to only \"see\" 4GB (or less) volume sizes. So an 8gb card will be seen as two contiguous 4gig chunks. You'll still be able to access all of the data on the card but different apps (including Card Info) may behave differently.

So you CAN continue to use your 8gb microSDHC card, you'll just have to remember that if if you have ~5gb used on it, it'll just show ~1gb out of 4gb in use. If you'd rather not have any risk involved, just return it if you can and get a 4gb card instead.

The Windows Mobile powered Treo 800w and Pro have no such card capacity limitations, by the way.

The limitation that hkklife referenced is a limitation in the design of the API and it affect the volume size and the free space queries. Basically any time any application asks the OS what the volume size is or what the free space available is, if the actual returned value should have been greater than 4G, it will return the remainder of the correct size divided by 4G. This is because both of these API entries return the results in bytes in a 32-bit unsigned integer. The maximum value that one can represent in a 32-bit unsigned integer is 4G.

I understand that there is a patch available from PalmPowerups that will change these two API entries such that if the return value should have been greater than 4G they will return 4G. This value still isn't correct, but at least programs are not likely to do the wrong thing which such a value.

I have a Palm Centro Rev A. (firmware 1.07) and used it with 4GB (A-Data Class 6) microSDHC card and TomTom 6 Navigation paired with Globalsat bluetooth GPC receiver. Everything worked perfectly. As soon as I upgraded to 8GB (Transcent Class 6) microSDHC card application is extremely slow (almost unusable!). As a test I copied all my files back to 4GB card and everything is fast again. I did try to defragment the 8GB and it is at 0% fragmentation and still TomTom is very slow (please note that I don't see any other application problems and was able to access all 8GB). Any ideas?
Thanks!
Gene

I have a Palm Centro Rev A. (firmware 1.07) and used it with 4GB (A-Data Class 6) microSDHC card and TomTom 6 Navigation paired with Globalsat bluetooth GPC receiver. Everything worked perfectly. As soon as I upgraded to 8GB (Transcent Class 6) microSDHC card application is extremely slow (almost unusable!). As a test I copied all my files back to 4GB card and everything is fast again. I did try to defragment the 8GB and it is at 0% fragmentation and still TomTom is very slow (please note that I don't see any other application problems and was able to access all 8GB). Any ideas?
Thanks!
Gene[/b]

I have a Palm Centro Rev A. (firmware 1.07) and used it with 4GB (A-Data Class 6) microSDHC card and TomTom 6 Navigation paired with Globalsat bluetooth GPC receiver. Everything worked perfectly. As soon as I upgraded to 8GB (Transcent Class 6) microSDHC card application is extremely slow (almost unusable!). As a test I copied all my files back to 4GB card and everything is fast again. I did try to defragment the 8GB and it is at 0% fragmentation and still TomTom is very slow (please note that I don't see any other application problems and was able to access all 8GB). Any ideas?
Thanks!
Gene

I was getting an error \"Invalid User\" and didn't realize that my posts went through. Maybe someone from Palm Infocenter can fix the posting bug????
Thanks,
Gene

Re: Card issue.

I have heard, but do not have direct experience, that this is due to a poorly written FAT32 driver under Palm OS, that is does get slower with larger cards. This can be minimized by reformatting the card with smaller cluster sizes. Alas the Format on the Palm does not let one select the cluster size, so one has to do it from a desktop.

Re: Posting error.

Yeah, I've seen that error a lot here lately. I have taken to, when I see an error, double check to see if what I was trying to do happened anyways before trying again.

Same problem w/ slow TomTom on an 8GB Class 6 SDHC. Nothing really to add. Just getting the thread in case someone finds a solution.

Nevermind. I reformatted my card using the command "format X: /FS:FAT32 /A:16K" and that did the trick.

Another good thread on this here: http://discussion.treocentral.com/treo- ... 0-a-2.html

BTW, turns out the default cluster size for Fat32 on my 8GB card was 4k, and that the 16k cluster size helped speed up TomTom considerably. So the issue seems to be that the default cluster size is too small, not too large.