Sandisk MS PRO

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops,comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

DRY <newsmaster2000(sinesto)@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I bought a Sandisk 512 memory stick pro for a Sony Clie UX80, but ir
> only recognizes 468MB and it doesn not work faster than a normal
> memory stick. Any ideas??

512MB is unformatted. It's formatted with FAT, which eats up a good chunk
of the memory for the File Allocation Table (FAT). In addition, the card
will contain a bunch of default folders and files, all of which will take up
at least one block. 468MB should be considered normal for a "blank" 512MB
card.

As for the speed, I've seen reports that the new blueish MS Pro sticks from
Sandisk which costs much less than other MS Pro sticks are, indeed, slower
than the peachish white ones. But then again, $150 for a 512MB SanDisk card
is a lot less than the $220 Sony or $280 Lexar 512MB MS Pro cards.

Regards,
--
*Art

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops,comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

Thank you so much for the answers. My San disk memory stick is white, not
blue... but maybe both blue and white are slower.
It is very dissapointing to me that when you buy a 512MB MS you only have
468MB (44 MB less!!!). My older 128 Memory stick has 126 usable.

"DRY" <newsmaster2000(sinesto)@yahoo.com> escribió en el mensaje
news:xyMCc.428$EO.1127@jagger.tie.cl...
> I bought a Sandisk 512 memory stick pro for a Sony Clie UX80, but ir only
> recognizes 468MB and it doesn not work faster than a normal memory stick.
> Any ideas??
>
>

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops,comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

"DRY" <newsmaster2000(sinesto)@yahoo.com> schreef in bericht
news:xyMCc.428$EO.1127@jagger.tie.cl...
> I bought a Sandisk 512 memory stick pro for a Sony Clie UX80, but ir only
> recognizes 468MB and it doesn not work faster than a normal memory stick.
> Any ideas??

512 MB according to the manufacterer is 512.000.000 bytes. 512.000.000/1024
(!) is 500.000 kB
500.000 kB/1024 is 488 MB according to a binair system.
Depents on the way you define MB (guess how the manufacterer counts).

Then you subtract some MB's for the FAT, default subdirectorys installed by
your os, and you are at 468, useable binairy, MB's.

A. Wi

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops,comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

> Thank you so much for the answers. My San disk memory stick is white, not
> blue... but maybe both blue and white are slower.
> It is very dissapointing to me that when you buy a 512MB MS you only have
> 468MB (44 MB less!!!). My older 128 Memory stick has 126 usable.

Again because of the File Allocation Table. The bigger the storage
device.... the bigger the FAT is. If you have or know anyone who has a brand
new 250GB hard drive ask them to check the size after it is Fdisk'ed and
Format'ed. You will see that no matter what OS, at least in the Windows
arena (I've not checked it on Linux. I may do that on monday when I have
access to a Linux machine) as the drive gets bigger the FAT gets much
larger. I know that the 200GB drive I just put in as by backup uses just
under 20GB with NTFS as the file system. That's bigger then the first 10 or
so hard drives I've owned thru the years combined!! (My first hard drive was
a MFM 5MB external drive.)Yikes.

Regards,

-Skon

Logic is like a little bird...

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 01:04:45 -0600, Skon Of Vulcan wrote:

> Again because of the File Allocation Table. The bigger the storage
> device.... the bigger the FAT is. If you have or know anyone who has a brand
> new 250GB hard drive ask them to check the size after it is Fdisk'ed and
> Format'ed. You will see that no matter what OS, at least in the Windows
> arena (I've not checked it on Linux. I may do that on monday when I have
> access to a Linux machine) as the drive gets bigger the FAT gets much
> larger. I know that the 200GB drive I just put in as by backup uses just
> under 20GB with NTFS as the file system.

For FAT32 each FAT entry occupies 4 bytes of the table, and for
drives up to 8 GB, each disk cluster reserves 4k bytes of disk
space. So a 512 MB drive would have a FAT with 125,000 4 byte
entries, using approx. 0.5 MB, or 0.1 percent of the disk space. As
drives get larger the cluster size increases, up to 32k bytes, so
the FAT occupies an even smaller percentage of the disk space. If
FAT16 is used (limited to drives up to 2 GB), for a given drive
size, the clusters will probably be larger, with smaller FATs.

NTFS has many advantages over FAT32, but does require more disk
space in overhead. With FAT32, a 200 GB drive would use 32kb disk
clusters, and its FAT would use about 25 MB of the disk space, far
less that the 20 GB you say is used by your NTFS. Note: Make that
50 MB, since Windows maintains a backup copy of the FAT.

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops,comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

DRY <newsmaster2000(sinesto)@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thank you so much for the answers. My San disk memory stick is white,
> not blue... but maybe both blue and white are slower.
> It is very dissapointing to me that when you buy a 512MB MS you only
> have 468MB (44 MB less!!!). My older 128 Memory stick has 126 usable.

By default, a FAT16 volume will preallocate 512 root folder entries, and for
a 128MB drive with a 4kB cluster size, that's 512*4kB or 2MB. Double it to
cover the space of the shadow FAT, and you're down to 124MB. Just by
creating the default directory structure and card identifier files, you dip
down to 123MB-something.

For a 512MB card, the cluster size should normally be 16kB, and the root
folder takes up at least 8MB, plus at least 16kB for each file/subfolder.
That should leave you with 493MB-something.

HOWEVER, and this is the big breaker -- a preformatted Sandisk 512MB MS Pro,
for whatever reason, doesn't have an 16kB cluster size, but a 32kB one. It
is for all practical purposes treated like a 2GB stick with only 1/4 of the
memory available.
Thus you waste not 2*16MB = 32MB for the root, leaving you with 470MB.
Creating the default directory structure and card identifier files puts you
down to your 468MB.

Back a few years ago with hard drives this size, it was a common trick to
format a 512MB drive with a 511MB partition, to get a 8kB block size instead
of a 16kB one. You actually ended up with more usable space, because the
cluster size became half the size (8kB instead of 16kB). I don't know if
there's any utilities that lets you do the same for a Memory Stick, though.
If so, it would pay off to format any card >=128MB at 1MB below their actual
size.

In any case, if you can reformat the stick on a PC, you should get the 8kB
block size that the 512MB stick really *should* have, leaving you with more
usable space. See this thread for more details:
<URL: http://www.cliesource.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=...;

Regards,
--
*Art