6GB microSDHC and 16GB SDHC Cards Now Available

Posted By: Kris Keilhack Monday, October 22, 2007 8:24:32 AM

6gb MicroSDOwners of Treo 750 and 755p smartphones have been stuck at the 4GB limit for some time now, enviously watching as fullsize SDHC capacities soar to 16GB while 8GB SDHC card prices continue to plummet. Now it appears that some relief is in sight for users of not just the miniSD-equipped Treos 750/755p but microSD Palm devices such as the new Palm Centro and Treo 500v. Sandisk now has a 6GB microSDHC card for sale on their site with a $99.99 MSRP.

A recent search through a variety of e-tailers results in numerous listings of 6GB Class 4 Sandisk microSDHC cards. Amazon, is offering the 6GB card for a surprisingly low $80.85 with free shipping. Per Sandisk’s standard practice, the card ships with a Micromate USB 2.0 reader/writer. The card carries Sandisk’s standard 5-year limited warranty. Unfortunately for Treo 750 and 755p owners, the Sandisk card includes just a fullsize SDHC adapter so a miniSD adapter will have to be sourced elsewhere.

Also notable, the first legitimate-looking 8GB Sandisk microSDHC cards have begun appearing on E-Bay and on several small e-tail sites. Prices for the 8GB cards are in the neighborhood of $120 but Sandisk has not announced initial availability as of yet. Considering the relative success of using 8GB SDHC fullsize cards on the Treo 680 and 700p, 8GB miniSDHC cards might prove to be more capable than their 6GB siblings. An ongoing TreoCentral forum thread indicates that the 6GB microSDHC cards are unfortunately seen by Palm OS devices as only having ~1. 7GB of available space. This information should be taken with a grain of salt at the moment, as no widespread testing has not been done due to the newness of both the Centro, 500v, and 6GB microSDHC cards.

Assuming Palm works out the kinks in the Garnet OS' file system to support card capacities larger than 4GB, all of the above news is a welcome sign that the 4GB logjam is finally being lifted for users of mini/micro SDHC devices. It will also be interesting to see if manufacturers begin to phase out miniSD-equipped devices in favor of microSD. Palm, for example, has only released two smartphones in a year’s time with miniSDHC but has already released two models with microSDHC in the past month.

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already? wow!

joad @ 10/22/2007 4:15:44 PM # Q
looks like they're getting closer to catching up with size of the SD/SDHC format that was formerly used by Handers, Palm, Garmin and others since about 7 or so years ago....

"Closer," but the smaller card technology may always lag a few Gigs behind the "old-fashioned" SD/SDHC format in size and speed (and durability and find-ability). Never figured they'd release an intermediary 6GB card - the 8GB card seems the logical step.

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**Another vote for a >100MB RAM Treo**

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Any plans for Palm to support >4GB cards?

DrewT3 @ 10/23/2007 3:12:32 AM # Q
Have there been any rumors about Palm planning to support cards larger than 4GB in Garnet? Most people assumed that Palm keeps going to newer, smaller card formats so they can avoid having to deal with the 4GB limitation in Garnet.

RE: Any plans for Palm to support >4GB cards?
WareW01f @ 10/23/2007 11:47:25 AM # Q
Keep dreaming.

I will say not going to happen. Its a limitation of the fact that there is a 32 bit interface. I shutter at the funky ways developers would have to access the media to get at the extra space. (Hey lets go back and actually use something other than card 0!!)

Seriously, the scope of such a change is well out of the Garnet product cycle and silly with Palm's (and PalmSource/ACCESS's long since) focus on Linux.

I've long since thought that Palm would have done well to add a second media slot under the battery. This would have bought them some time. (VFS already supports this, see the T5 and the LifeDrive) Alas, they didn't. Works quite well on my Nokia N800. (Was a firmware upgrade and BAM! I can have 16GB... not that I would shell that out at this point)

Nope, time to either shop for a new device, or wait for 2009. Look at the bright side, we'll be past 32GB a card by then!

RE: Any plans for Palm to support >4GB cards?
hkklife @ 10/23/2007 1:21:04 PM # Q
Yup, since it apears Palm has to stick with Garnet for a while longer, a reasonably work-around would be a Treo with a 2gb or 4gb internal flash volume IN ADDITION to the 4gb or less expansion card slot.

Just like a more modern execution of the T5 or LifeDrive. And there are a fair amount of programs already two-storage-volumes-aware from the good ol' T5/LD/Clie days.

I'd personally rather see the above scenario implemented than 2 microSD card slots.

SDHC in its current form is spec'd to go up to 32gb and I imagine that'll be fairly widespread and affordble by this time next year. I would imagine that most companies will then start to put fullsize SDHC out to pasture on mainstream products within the next year or two. They'll then probably come up with an "SDHC 2.0" variant and it'll end up kinda like the "big" professional/prosumer card format for the years to come (much like how CF is now) with microSDHC being the smaller mainstream format.



Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

RE: Any plans for Palm to support >4GB cards?
kevint @ 10/23/2007 4:59:40 PM # Q
They support them just fine; I've used an 8GB SDHC in both my Treo 650 and my Treo 700p with no problems. The only issue is in the amount of free space they report, which seems to be Capacity MOD 4GB. (Which totally explains the 1.7GB report from the 6GB cards... I'll bet you can easily load them up with 5.7GB of stuff.)
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