512 GB SD Card - Will it work?

Help Fairphone 3
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I wonder, what kind of problems I have to expect, when I use an sdcard, that is larger than the officially supported size.
My card is sized 512GB, while the supported size is afaik 400GB.
My PF3+ running LOS19 detects and seems to work well with it. The size is reported correctly as 512GB. No error message on read, or write.
Are there any possible failures, that come up long term?

Best regards
Frytz

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Have a look at this list maybe others already noted pros/cons with bigger SD cards.

Else I think that @urs_lesse used/tested SD cards that are bigger than supported on all Fairphones?

Overall I guess you would not do and still the warning: dont format as internal extension!

Here is an older discussion

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The maximum I tested myself on all devices is a SanDisk Ultra 400 GB. However, I can say that on all three Fairphone generations before the FP4, I was able to use this card although the official maximum SD capacity for FP1, FP2 and FP3 was stated as (much) lower then. I also remember that at least one user reported that a 1 TB SD card works in his FP3 (!). To be honest, I think the maximum SD capacities stated in Fairphone specifications is based more on experience rather than any strict technical limitation.

My impression is that incompatibility of SD cards happens, but capacity doesn’t seem to be the usual reason for this.

Given your (Frytz) card works, I would not expect any specific danger. Of course, all cards can fail, but I don’t think the capacity has a lot to do with that.

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I´m using a 400 GB SD card in my FP3 (with /e/), too.
This is working good but in the last two years I had three times full data loss.
I´m not sure if the problem is with the card or with the software.

I learned to life with the risk of data loss and am not bothered much by it.

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Nah, at least nothing worse than any other card. I have a 512GB myself for over a year now and it keeps working.

As long as there is no technology change (like SDHC to SDXC about 10 years ago) you should be able to use any huge card, even beyond 1TB.

However, that’s a lot of data - you might want to back it up sometimes, for example even automated with programs like SyncThing or similar:
https://alternativeto.net/software/syncthing/about/

Never occurred to me (knocking on wood) but happened to my daughter when she slid down stairs with her phone in the back pocket: Phone was okay but the card gave up (64GB). Was unrecoverable, even for testdisk.

A little trick I read somewhere and that works well (at least for me): If you have that much space, it doesn’t hurt to do some OverProvisioning, ie reduce the partition to 90% and keep the remaining 10% free/unformatted. Thus the card has always spare blocks and thus minimizes effects of write amplification.

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I don’t know if this is relevant but I am using a Sandisk 512GB Ultra on my FP4. It is now 80% full. No errors or irregularities of any kind reported. Reports max sizr and current utilization correctly. No read or write errors to date.

It has been running since May 2022.

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@UCTfp I believe, your FP4 supports 1TB, so for me it seems a bit expectable, that a 512GB card works well. :slight_smile:
When it comes to me, I decided to give my 512 GB card (Sandisk as well) a try and it works well, as for now.
I do not worry that much about data loss. Really personal data are stored on the phones encrypted data partition. My card is mostly for Music, OSMAnd offline maps, and short term place to place data transport.

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Just hope you have a backup for that :slight_smile:

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As I reported in a different post, I am unfortunately very experienced in phone crashes.
Therefore my data backup strategy is more than once tested irl. :grimacing:
It depends merely on a few simple, weekly taken steps:

  • export contacts to file
  • export calendar to file
  • backup threema to file
  • backup k9 mail settings to file
  • run “adb pull /sdcard” with phone connected to pc.

From time to time, I also export all installed apps as apk, using “adb shell” commands

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My FP4 did not support the Sandisk 1TB ÎźSD when I first started using my FP4. There were reports from a few people who had problems with Sandisk 512MB. So far, 512MB has worked on my FP4. It is 80% full. It is formatted external.

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Oh, nice. And re-importing works without hassle? Can you elaborate or drop a link, please? Pleeeze :heart_eyes:

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I use an Ubuntu Desktop Linux on my PC and a Lineage OS w/o GAPPS on my FP3.
With this environment my APK Backup is as easy as executing this command line:
for line in $(adb shell pm list packages -3 -f) ; do AppName=$(echo $line|sed ‘s/^.==/base.apk=//');AppPath=$(echo $line|sed 's/base./base.apk/’|sed ‘s/package://’) ; adb pull $AppPath ./APKs/${AppName}.apk; done

This is directly copied from my backup script and so it needs some explanation.
(you might have to recode it for a windows environment anyway)

  1. Get a list of all third party apps that are installed (all manually installed apps, regardles whether downloaded from anywhere, from f-droid, aurora,…)
    adb shell pm list packages -3 -f
    The output has one line for each app. In example, the line for my threema messenger is
    package:/data/app/~~ZDzedsFANkrMJplInTeuPA==/ch.threema.app-KttNbvv7JYJ3cxLblQnMLA==/base.apk=ch.threema.app
  2. Extract the “friendly name” of the app. This is the part at the end of the line behind “==/base.apk=”
    In my example it is “ch.threema.app” I put it in the variable “AppName”.
  3. Extract the “real path” of the app. This starts behind “package:” and ends always with “base.apk”.
    In my example it is “/data/app/~~ZDzedsFANkrMJplInTeuPA==/ch.threema.app-KttNbvv7JYJ3cxLblQnMLA==/base.apk” I put it in the variable “AppPath”.
  4. Now pull the apk.
    adb pull $AppPath ./APKs/${AppName}.apk
    In my example this results in
    adb pull /data/app/~~ZDzedsFANkrMJplInTeuPA==/ch.threema.app-KttNbvv7JYJ3cxLblQnMLA==/base.apk ./APKs/ch.threema.app.apk
    Now I have a file ch.threema.app.apk in my local subfolder “APKs”.

If you have problems recoding this to windows, you could get the list from step 1 and create a list of “adb pull” commands by hand. You would have to update the list every time, you install a new app.

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Thanks! :star_struck: Wow, if it wasn’t for the script… convoluted :crazy_face: Good explanation.

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