# Hypothetical regarding SDcard and formatting



## jdunne (Jul 21, 2011)

Would there be any added benefit formatting the SDcard into ext4 as well? Or will the charge not recognize the card if formatted in anything but msdos?


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## aaronDroid80 (Aug 18, 2011)

I had thought the same thing, but then you wouldn't be able to mount it in windows as external storage (i think).

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## jdunne (Jul 21, 2011)

No big deal to me considering I run linux anyways

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## imnuts (Jun 9, 2011)

The only two problems I see would be that you wouldn't be able to mount it in Windows easily, and you'd also need to backup your SDCard and restore it after formatting. Also, the internal formatting utility for Android I believe will format as FAT, as will CWM I believe. So, as long as you never plan on formatting it outside of the initial format, you may see a slight increase in performance, but probably not much.


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## jdunne (Jul 21, 2011)

Something to consider. The only improvement I can see being noticable is using apps installed on the sd card while using lagfix.

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## rand4ll (Aug 20, 2011)

If you format to ext3 or 2 you can use the ext2ifs driver for windows to mount it and read/write...and is free


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## jdunne (Jul 21, 2011)

Like I said, not too big of a deal for me. I'm running linux on my laptop. It's nothing to format into ext3 and read it.

I'm gonna test this and see if there's any major changes. Will update.

Update #1:
Card will update to ext4, however andriod doesn't like the format. Go figure :3
Trying to do ext3, but the card doesn't want to format into it. It will go to FAT the ext4, but every time I try 3 the card stalls.

Update #2:
Found the issue, don't try to format through the phone. Use a reader  Anyways, I flashed a spare 2GB card with ext3 and I got the same story as ext4, android doesn't want to mount the card due to a "blank or unsupported file system" and unfortunately, same story for ext2. I'm gonna try less conventional formats to see what exactly android will accept in forms of sdcard formats.

Update #3:
Pointless. Android is too picky on what it wants in that slot. It will NOT accept any format except FAT (including ntfs). So then I thought I'd try to be sly and set the sd card's partition flag to say it was a FAT even though it was formatted in ext3. Nope. Saw right through it. Whatever it is, Android looks beyond flags and looks at the actual format it's self when it does it's little media scan. And just to see performance wise if flags did make any difference, I formatted the card into FAT and set it's flag as Linux. I actually got worse speeds than the card's stock format. It's not by much, but still about a whole mbps. I'm gonna play around with flags a little more to see if I can get anything better than the stats I posted below, but I doubt it. This is completely busted unless a future build can maybe find a file in the system that controls what the SD reader likes.

Test file: 100mb in 64 files

Stock
Avg Read: 10.1 mbps
Peak: 10.4 mbps
Low: 9.4 mbps

FAT w/ Linux flag
Avg Read: 9.3 mbps
Peak: 9.8 mbps
Low: 6.4 mbps


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## timedroid (Aug 24, 2011)

The stock vold (volume manager daemon) will only mount sdcards as FAT.
Here's a thread where someone made a patch to get ext4 sdcards working on Cyanogenmod. Looks like a different version of EXT support made it into CM now.

Also as noted on the code review linked to from the thread, you'd run into problems with permissions. That is, files on ext4 have individual permissions while files on fat do not.
Note to self: it seems like mounting the sdcard with the grpid option would help that a bit.


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