Picomite(2) How to Format drive "B:"

Author	Message
bfwolf Regular Member Joined: 03/01/2025 Location: Germany Posts: 51	Posted: 09:53pm 01 Feb 2025         matherp said     Quote   Shouldn't this also apply to drive B: No. Deliberately not. FatFS has the capability but it is disabled for safety reasons I understand Peter's reasons and agree with him! It is really not a good idea to format SD cards using the "standard means". Even formatting SD cards using the standard format tool in Windows is not recommended! Instead, this tool should be used: (Windows and Mac) https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/ or for Linux: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/sd-memory-card-formatter-for-linux/ Background: SD cards consist of NAND flash memory chips and a controller that manages them. This controller implements an "FTL" (Flash Translation Layer), which emulates a magnetic data carrier with arbitrarily writable blocks. In fact, the NAND flash memory chips consist of larger erasable sectors that contain 2^n writable blocks. In addition, these erasable sectors become defective over time due to many deletion processes. To avoid this, the FTL carries out "wear leveling" to stress the sectors evenly. The FTL also detects defective sectors and then replaces them with reserve sectors. The strategy used is optimized for the FAT file system. However, a different cluster size is usually used than the one that Windows' own formatting tool would choose, for example. The SD Association's formatting tool reads special information on the SD card (via special registers) to determine the optimal cluster size! Formatting an SD card with Windows' own formatting tool (which was designed for magnetic data storage devices) works, but is not optimal and affects the performance and lifespan of the card! What you can do safely with the Windows formatting tool is "quickformat", because this only initializes the FAT.