While waiting for a messenger to bring me my new Trinity I’ve realised that there’s no MiniSD card included in the box. I’ve always thought that better no card than something like 16MB (especially when bundled with 10megapixel digital camera =) but today as the card prices significantly dropped I expected a bit more from HTC. So which Mini Secure Digital should I buy?
Sandisk - leader in memory card market today - is manufacturing various cards of various form factors and sizes. Mini SD card is officialy manufactured in sizes up to 2GB. However there are also a 4GB Mini SD cards available on market. They are unsupported by Sandisk and according to their press release:
Be aware of non-SDA 2.00 specification compliant SD 4GB and miniSD 4GB cards on the market. If these non-compliant SD/miniSD 4GB cards record data in a SDHC host, and are then used in a legacy SD/miniSD host, issues and problems may occur. File system incompatibility, data corruption, and potentially you may actually lose the data/pictures. In addition, if these non-compliant SD/miniSD 4GB cards are inserted into a legacy SD/miniSD host device, the host device may not recognize/utilize the card as 4GB, and it instead may read as a 2GB card. If the SD/miniSD 4GB card does not have SDHC/miniSDHC on it, it is not SD 2.00 compliant.
So here we go. There’re MiniSDHC cards which officialy supports sizes greater than 2GB (but HTC P3600 does not support them), unofficial MiniSD cards supporting up to 4GB with lot of potentional incompatibilities and potentional problems rising up. When I was about to choose my card on my favourite eshop I was confident about getting the 2GB and save me some extra hassle. Few minutes before my final order the shop just introduced the 4GB version of MiniSD card. The price was low, speeds seemed fair so I tested it out.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on one of them, before they got sold out. My (only possible) choice was an Emtec 4GB MiniSD. The hype says that it’s speed is 80x - who knows how is the x big. I don’t. The write speed should be up to 4MB/s and read up to 7MB/s. This looks strange as the Sandisk Ultra II 60x speed card should outperform this card a bit (9MB write / 10MB read). Who cares, it was the only 4GB choice anyway.
One would go for MiniSDHC card, but the device does not officialy supports it and even if you can flash the ROM with WM6 and get some partial SDHC support, it still does not work 100% - according to xda-developers directories are disappearing. According to official HTC support you can have up to 12GB miniSD card in your Trinity.
Even the official EMTEC homepage does not list the 4GB MiniSD card today, but what’s most important EMTEC MiniSD 4GB works in HTC P3600 Trinity. The bad side is that any of my three cardreaders does not recognise it, so I will have to upload everything via the ActiveSync app.
1GB version of my new MiniSD Card:
great little article.
the power of blogging at work. i have found more information here than on official faq’s etc
thanks mate!
One more remark: I read in a forum that a Transcend 4 GB MiniSD card would do, ordered one at http://www.transcend.de (website is in German only) and it works - now for more than 2 months - without a problem.
If (due to crashed applications) I get a messy card, I use Pocket Mechanic to clear up lost clusters (this is like CHKDSK on PCs). In order to access the MiniSD Card (avoiding incompatible card readers), I used WM5torage (not always reliable) and finally purchased CardExportII. This way, the MiniSD card is like an external USB drive to the Host PC.
Good luck!
One more: Transcend of course also offers a Website in English: http://www.transcend-uk.com and http://www.transcend.nl !