Homebrew Discussion What brand is your eXfat formatted SD card did it corrupt?

[Deleted User]

If you use the official SD Formatting utility on PC it will make the 16mb empty partition as well.

That being said I've personally used 4 switches with 4 different Samsung Evo+ U3 128gb cards on exFat that so far have been fine.

 

[notimp]

Page 2 - first mention of "brand doesnt matter", if the SD card is not defect.

 

[RitchieRitchie]

I have 200gb Sandisk. It's been working fine however if i connect to pc it advises that I scan first as there may be a problem - then when i do it doesn't find any problems and I can use it okay.

 

[BlastedGuy9905]

Apparently SanDisk SD cards have a 16mb unallocated partition which sandisk has this to say about "You may leave the 16MB unallocated space as it is. A portion of the total capacity is used to store certain functions including optimizations of the memory that support performance and endurance and therefore is not available for user storage.“ could this be a reason why some sd cards corrupt and others don’t? Any responses appreciated

Hama 64GB card, no corruption.

 

[Techjunky90]

I have 200gb Sandisk. It's been working fine however if i connect to pc it advises that I scan first as there may be a problem - then when i do it doesn't find any problems and I can use it okay.

my windows 10 tablet does the same thing, seems to be a windows bug, I just ignore it

 

[Dennieh]

Sandisk and it didnt corrupt

 

[eyeliner]

PNY 64Gb card that was previously on my 3DS. Now on Switch, exFat formatted, being constantly drilled like a pornstar with a need for money for the next boobjob.

Working ok.

 

[nizuri]

200GB Sandisk, no corruption. Plenty of crashes.

 

[DogParty]

Samsung 256gb exfat and never had any problems. Considering formatting to FAT32 though cuz I'm not really trying to have a corrupted system lol

 

[Caleb Metzger]

Samsung 256gb exfat and never had any problems. Considering formatting to FAT32 though cuz I'm not really trying to have a corrupted system lol

I did. Just split your XCIs so they fit on the Fat32. It’s an extra step but worth having the peace of mind.

 

[Wurstmann]

I think the more interesting question would be if you remove whatever brand SD you have while the console is on.

 

[Deleted User]

30 switch mods done so far all with Samsung, Sandisk and pny only. So far no corruptions.

 

[AlexTCGPro]

Kingston 32gb, formatted with partition wizard, no problem so far

 

[HOv]

Everyone I've seen that has corrupted has been using a cheap card or a sandisk card.

Using Samsung and have used homebrew all the time and have had no issues.

If you look on here, from page 1 actually, someone mentioned that they experience corruption with a Samsung SD card and when switched to SanDisk, no more corruption.

So in short, it sounds like it might not be the brand. For me, I have a SanDisk 400gb exfat and never ever gotten any corruption. I've had several crashes thinking my SD card got corrupted but no. I play switch games and 1 Homebrew (retronx). I've had this SD card for 3 months now btw. Just to be on the safe side though, I made a complete backup of my SD card in case I get corruption.

 

[stewacide]

How common is this corruption issue really?

If it’s exfat that’s the problem, I know there are XCIs splitters/joiners but is he same true for NSPs?

 

[HiD]

How common is this corruption issue really?

If it’s exfat that’s the problem, I know there are XCIs splitters/joiners but is he same true for NSPs?

It’s doable. But it requires a mini virtual file system implementation (not that hard) to account for all file operations (read. write, seek, ...) and reroute then to the physical file and offset.
The problem is it makes all apps a bit harder to code as they cannot use standard C functions anymore (unless we do some sort of hooking library)

The thing I don’t know yet actually (if somebody has the answer) is in the case we have a split NSP/XCI installer, if it’s possible to install a very large game (ex: 20gigs, with large NCAs) to a fat32 SD Card.

NSPs are already handled via some sort of virtual file system in libnx though, so we might have to extract NCAs first and split the big ones, then install the extracted folder. Not the ideal user experience though. I’ll have to look at the code to consider that.

Edit: corruption is a big problem, especially for devs. It’s not uncommon to crash during dev, and each crash increases the risk of corrupting your exFat partition. Now I have 2 cards, one in Fat32 and on in exFat, but it’s not ideal and I never know for sure my exFat is not corrupted.