Dreamcast SD card

[Dreamcast_Fan]

What biggest SD card can Dreamcast read through SD card reader? Is 32GB SDHC maximum or can I use 64GB or 128 GB SDXC? What is the limit?
I have this SD card reader:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8i02khxZ4c

[Aleron Ives]

I think people have gotten cards as large as 8 GB to work, but smaller ones are probably better, as DreamShell sometimes corrupts them and forces you to reformat. I don't think 32 GB is supported at all, let alone SDXC sizes.

[pcwzrd13]

I don't think 32 GB is supported at all, let alone SDXC sizes.

I can confirm that 32GB DOES work. I use one myself! They do have 64GB SDHC cards now so I'm curious if they would work.

[Aleron Ives]

I recall seeing a post on this forum saying that larger cards sometimes didn't read correctly in all cases. As for 64GB cards, those would be SDXC, not SDHC. SDHC only allows 32GB at most. SDXC cards can sometimes require different readers to connect them to PCs, as cheaper SD adapters only support SD and SDHC.

[pcwzrd13]

I recall seeing a post on this forum saying that larger cards sometimes didn't read correctly in all cases.

Dunno. I haven't had any issues with mine so far. Works perfectly!

As for 64GB cards, those would be SDXC, not SDHC.

That's what I thought too until I saw this. It clearly says SDHC on the card. It does say it's an SDXC card though so it's a bit odd. I have also seen a couple 64GB Micro SDHC cards by Sony and Samsung.

[Dreamcast_Fan]

It's fake. It is clearly photoshoped or edited in Paint.
As you can see:
8GB = SF-8UY
16GB = SF-16UY
32GB = SF-32UY
So the 64GB should have SF-64UY, but it has SF-4UY. It's fake. He photoshoped the 4GB one. Also all the images are the same size, but the 64GB is slightly bigger. I wonder why? There are no 64GB SDHC. That guy should be baned from Amazon.
So we know that the Dreamcast SD card reader supports 32 GB SDHC.
But would it support the 64GB SDXC or bigger?
The biggest difference is that SDHC uses FAT32 format and SDXC uses exFAT.
So we know that Dreamcast SD card reader supports FAT32 and FAT16 (which is in normal SD cards, not HC and XC ones). But would it support exFAT?
If yes, that would be great, we could use all SDXC card (if SD card reader and Dreamshell don't have any size limitation).
If no, that would be bad. But even then we would have a slight chance. There are no SDHC cards bigger than 32GB, because FAT32 should not allow for disk size bigger than 32GB. But there are programs like fat32format and other that allows for disks bigger than 32GB to be formatted in FAT32. But would this program work with SD cards or only with hard drives? I don't know. I only tried with hard drives and it works. Not sure about SD cards. Haven't tried. Maybe somebody here tried? Or maybe SDXC cards will work with Dreamact SD card reader without doing anything with them. Is there someone else who can shed some more light on this topic?

[pcwzrd13]

It's fake. It is clearly photoshoped or edited in Paint.

Yeah, looks like you're right. I just looked at the user uploaded images and they all say SDXC on the card. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't picked up on that yet as they're selling both Sony cards themselves.

[Aleron Ives]

Fake SD cards are unfortunately quite common, and there are many from knockoff brands that pretend to be from reputable ones.

There are no SDHC cards bigger than 32GB, because FAT32 should not allow for disk size bigger than 32GB.

This is incorrect. A FAT32 volume has a 2 TiB limit with 512 byte sectors. The reason SDHC cards cannot exceed 32GB is because of the limits of their form factor and memory type, not their filesystem. SDXC cards have further miniaturised memory to allow for higher capacities, which makes them more expensive. As for exFAT, it's a proprietary and undocumented filesystem, which means that there's no hope of DreamShell being able to read it, since swat doesn't know how it works. It's possible to reformat SDXC cards to FAT32, but special SD card formatting software is necessary to avoid overwriting the sparing table in the reformatting process.

[Dreamcast_Fan]

I see. So will SDXC card formatted to FAT32 work with Dreamcast SD card reader and Dreamshell?

[Aleron Ives]

It isn't worth the expense of an SDXC card to find out, IMO. SD cards have a low GB / $ ratio compared to HDDs.