When search engines fail you, do it the hard way

PHoNyMiKe · Post by **PHoNyMiKe** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 9:04 am

I bought a 2GB sd card a while ago. I've seen a few 2GB sandisk SD cards only show up as 1GB in windows. no matter what they only format to 1GB (fat16 or fat32). this card of mine happens to be a sandisk ultra II 2GB card. it only shows up as 1GB, and crashes my old ass mp3 player. I read up that some ebay folk sell fake storage devices with only half the memory. so I ripped it appart, and found 2 memory chips inside. it had a big S logo I've never seen before and part number FTNM49A8GK3W4. yay google comes up with 1 worthless website, as do other search engines.

so I search google for "flash identify fujitsu" because I tried to find a datasheet for some gba carts that had this fujitsu chip that had no results in serach engines. to my orgasmic surprise a site came up that has a list of names for all these logos found on flash chips. I saw the same S logo as on the chip for spectek, and the website had all the info, including a data sheet for the chips in my sticky hand.

it turns out there are 2 x 1GB nand chips in the SD card. I'm guessing one of them came loose and thus don't show up. oh well.

ReRuss · Post by **ReRuss** » Mon Dec 24, 2007 11:20 pm

I have 2GB Lexar SD card which also shows up as 1GB

I've yet to find anything to format it to 2GB

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 2:40 am

I'd say its the reader, assuming the public isn't being scammed.

Kajuru · Post by **Kajuru** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 3:55 am

Unrelated, but some storage devices use compression to fake a bigger capacity. They sell 8gb pendrives as 12gb, when it totally depends on the type of stored data.

whicker · Post by **whicker** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 9:24 am

your card reader probably does not support that large of a card. After a certain size, sector addressing will have to act differently. I don't know, but maybe 2 GB is the magic number?

Joe Camacho · Post by **Joe Camacho** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 11:06 am

Phoneymike is a genius, there, I said it.

Kajuru · Post by **Kajuru** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 4:09 pm

self-edit:double post

Kajuru · Post by **Kajuru** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 4:12 pm

whicker wrote:your card reader probably does not support that large of a card. After a certain size, sector addressing will have to act differently. I don't know, but maybe 2 GB is the magic number?

That's a very good point. The cam my girlfriend's bought only reads up to 1gb SDs

PHoNyMiKe · Post by **PHoNyMiKe** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 10:03 pm

I just got a 2GB micro sd for my phone, it shows up as 1.87GB and can be formatted to fat or fat32, so that sd was messed up.