[Discussion] USB installation

[Douglas Clark]

Mark,

The same is true for ECS - provided the USB stick is formatted with some standard formatting. If it is already formatted 
just plug it in. This true for FAT, and apparently for FAT 32. 

The DFSEE procedure is necessary in order to format a USB stick, or other drive, with FAT32.  ECS comes with a driver (IFS 
actually) to read and write to FAT32, but not to format FAT32. So if you want to format the stick FAT32, you  either have to 
format it on some other "appliance", or you have to use the DFSEE procedure.

There have been revisions to the SD specification over time. Cards larger than 4GB apparently conform to SDHC (HC = 
high capacity).  The ability of the card reader (or appliance) to recognize the card depends on when it was made. To 
quote 

"Devices that use SD cards identify the card by requesting a 128-bit identification string from the card. For 
standard-capacity SD cards, 12 of the bits are used to identify the number of memory clusters (ranging from 1 to 4,096) 
and 3 of the bits are used to identify the number of blocks per cluster (which decode to 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, or 512 
blocks per cluster).

In older 1.x implementations the standard capacity block was exactly 512 bytes. This gives 4,096 × 512 × 512 = 1 
gigabyte of storage memory. A later revision of the 1.x standard allowed a 4-bit field to indicate 1,024 or 2,048 bytes per 
block instead, yielding up to 4 gigabytes of memory storage.

Devices designed before this change may incorrectly identify such cards, usually by misidentifying a card with lower 
capacity than is the case by assuming 512 bytes per block rather than 1,024 or 2,048."

For example I have a fairly new camera (a couple of years old) that will not recognize a card larger than 2 GB.

And as someone else pointed out, some cards/sticks, are formatted with specialized softwared etc. to handle the larger 
sizes. BTW - my WinXP system/card reader also does not recognize my 8GB SD card, or an 8 GB USB stick.

My advice is to stick with 2GB or smaller size (1 GB is safest). You can format it as FAT, FAT is universal, and if you use 
the WPS to copy files onto the card/stick the long names will be preserved.

Quoting again

"The SDHC specification was completed in June 2006,[23] but by that time, non-standard high-capacity (>1GB) SD 
cards (based on the older 1.x specification) were already on the market. The two types of storage cards were not 
interchangeable, creating some confusion among customers. SD and SDHC cards and devices have these compatibility 
issues :

    * Devices that do not specifically support SDHC do not recognize SDHC memory cards.[24] Some devices can support 
SDHC through a firmware upgrade.[25]
    * SDHC devices are backward compatible with SD memory cards.[25]
    * Some manufacturers have produced 4 GB SD cards that conform to neither the SD2.0/SDHC spec nor existing SD 
devices.[26]
    * File System: SD cards are typically formatted with the FAT16 file system, while SDHC cards are typically formatted as 
FAT32.[22] However, both types of cards can support other general-purpose file systems, such as UFS2, ext2 or the 
proprietary exFAT for example.
    * Microsoft Windows may need a hotfix to support accessing SDHC cards."


Doug Clark



On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 05:30:44 -0700 (PDT) Mark Brueggemann wrote:
>
>
>--- On Mon, 6/21/10, Phil Parker <phil at math.wichita.edu> wrote:
>
>> No, why?
>
>Every other data appliance I use USB drives for - Doze, Linux, test
>equipment, my DVD player, even my TV set - you just plug in the drive
>and it's there.  I've never used USB on my eCS box and now that I see 
>that procedure, I won't even try.  It shouldn't be that hard.  USB
>drives aren't new.  Finding it somewhat incredible that there isn't
>some sort of native support for that in eCS by now.  Or maybe I'm
>missing something?
>
>
>Mark Brueggemann
>Albuquerque, NM
>
>
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>

Thanks

Douglas Clark