Largest Capacity MicroSD card for A500

[jpinsl]

The manual and Acer support both say that the maximum size of HD microSD card the A500 will recognize is 32 Gb.

Has anyone tried a 64 Gb card and found that it worked?

There are 128 Gb cards becoming available as well.

What would be the upper limit?

 

[WVUTampaAlum]

This will be interesting to see because 32gb is a special number and it is not easy to format fat32 above this. NTFS or ext2/3 different story.

 

[jpinsl]

Good point. It may well be that the FAT/FAT32 formatting is the limiting factor, not the size of the card itself.
I did find a number of early reviews from last spring that said 64 Gb cards could be used, but that was just around the time the product launched.

 

[Frederuco]

I have not tried in the A500, but I know that for the Transformer you can use 64 GB micro SD (and full size SD in the dock) if you reformat them for NTFS. If the A500 can read NTFS it should work the same.

 

[jpinsl]

The manual says the A500 only reads FAT or FAT32 cards. Anyone had success with NTFS or anything larger than 32 GB?

 

[Icebike]

The manual says the A500 only reads FAT or FAT32 cards. Anyone had success with NTFS or anything larger than 32 GB?

Since version 3.2 the acer handles ntfs just fine.

Also it is not particularly hard to format the larger cards (greaterh than 32gb) but Microsoft limited this capability in Windows 7, for some obscure reason. Linux will do it, and older versions of windows will do it, and there is a command line way to do it:

How to format external hard drive to FAT32 in Windows

 

[Douvie]

Since version 3.2 the acer handles ntfs just fine.

Also it is not particularly hard to format the larger cards (greaterh than 32gb) but Microsoft limited this capability in Windows 7, for some obscure reason. Linux will do it, and older versions of windows will do it, and there is a command line way to do it:

How to format external hard drive to FAT32 in Windows

No problem for the A500. I tried a 64GB stick with no problems.

I heard of the relatively new format FAT64 - I've seen comments about it on various websites but haven't heard of any actual product support as yet.

 

[Icebike]

I think Fat64 is just another name for EXFat.

See: exFAT - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[jpinsl]

No problem for the A500. I tried a 64GB stick with no problems.

Sure you can mount just about anything via USB; I am wondering if a 64 or 128 GB microSD High Capacity (HC) Card is supported on the A500 now that we have Android 3.2.

 

[Frederuco]

I would recommend using NTFS for formatting your cards if the device reads it. FAT32 has a single file limit of 4 GB. If you have a movie rip that is over 4 GB, it will not be able to fit on the microSD. However, NTFS has a much larger limit that you cannot exceed unless you get a large RAID array on a computer.

 

[spexwood]

Sure you can mount just about anything via USB; I am wondering if a 64 or 128 GB microSD High Capacity (HC) Card is supported on the A500 now that we have Android 3.2.

Don't take this as a final answer, as I'm most likely wrong, but I THINK that the hardware needs to be able to read such cards. So, maybe it won't work.
Still, the only way to know would be to ask a higher up tech support from Acer or to give it a try (but not too many of us have 64gb+ microSD cards laying around to try, so....)

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Android Tablet Forum

 

[Frederuco]

Don't take this as a final answer, as I'm most likely wrong, but I THINK that the hardware needs to be able to read such cards. So, maybe it won't work.
Still, the only way to know would be to ask a higher up tech support from Acer or to give it a try (but not too many of us have 64gb+ microSD cards laying around to try, so....)

Most likely the tech support will tell you no. The reason is that any microSD or SD card larger than 32 GB is classified as SDXC. The SDXC official compliance requires devices to be able to read the format of exFAT (extended FAT) and currently Honeycomb has not been allowed to do this.

So long as the card can be formatted to NTFS (use any WinVista or Win7 machine) it will be readable if the tablet can read the NTFS file system (which is part of Honeycomb 3.2 if I recall).

Perhaps ICS will support exFAT, but currently it is not supported.

 

[spexwood]

So long as the card can be formatted to NTFS (use any WinVista or Win7 machine) it will be readable if the tablet can read the NTFS file system (which is part of Honeycomb 3.2 if I recall).

So are you saying that if you formatted a 64gb as NTFS, it should work?
Or can a 64gb not work unless in exFAT?
(I'm interested in knowing the answer to the original quedtion too)

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Android Tablet Forum

 

[Frederuco]

So are you saying that if you formatted a 64gb as NTFS, it should work?
Or can a 64gb not work unless in exFAT?

A 64 GB card will be formatted to exFAT out of the box per the specs of the SDXC standard. This card will not work in an ASUS Transformer running HC 3.2 (should be the same for the A500).
If you take that same card to your nearest WinVista or Win7 PC and format it for NTFS and then pop it in your tablet, it should work so long as your device can read NTFS. I can verify that this works in an ASUS Transformer running 3.2 and 3.2.1.

I would test the NTFS capabilities of your tablet with a smaller card that is on hand before shelling out the mucho dinero for a 64 GB or larger card.

 

[Icebike]

A 64 GB card will be formatted to exFAT out of the box per the specs of the SDXC standard.

Correction:

Exfat is a Microsoft invention that only applies to Vista and Win7, and XP with sp3.

You can format 64g and beyond to regular Fat32 with earlier Windows operating systems, and a command line utility that comes with Win7, as well as free utilities from many other disk drive manufacturers (google for them, they are free), as well as any Linux Distribution.

Fat32 is not limited to 32gig.

exFat is still patent pending.