Hacking Is it bad... to..

[Nero]

Quick format your MicroSD for your R4DS?

I've never known this myself because I've never tried, so will it still work out if it's been "Quick" formatted?

~Nero

 

[striderx]

Bad? No... you can't hurt the card. There's virtually nothing you can do within the confines of your computer that can "hurt the card."

Except...

Excessive read write cycles, BUT ONLY much greater than you're ever going to do playing with ROMs and homebrew can theoretically "wear it out."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 100,000 write-erase-cycles for block 0, and no guarantees for other blocks[citation needed]). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors; this technique is called wear levelling. Another mechanism is to perform write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure, which is named bad block management (BBM). With these mechanisms in place, some industry analysts[1] have calculated that flash memory can be written to at full speed continuously for 51 years before exceeding its write endurance, even if such writes frequently cause the entire memory to be overwritten. This figure (51 years) involved a worst-case scenario using specific data parameters and should not be confused with a particular "shelf life" for a flash memory device. The bottom line is that a typical user using a commercial device, such as a camera, with a flash drive will probably not wear out the memory for the effective life of the camera. However, it - like any other hardware component - can fail. Anyone using flash memory (and any other medium) for critical data would be well advised to backup the data to another device (preferably of a different medium).

Oh, and the usual, don't rub it on a synthetic carpet in the winter, don't bend or fold it, don't subject it to excessive heat, cold or flame or solvents... you know the usual.

I'm not sure what if any tangible difference there is between quick format and full format with respect to flash memory versus disk storage (floppy or hard).

From a google citation of a google citation...

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=5401

QUOTEA full format does three things:
erases all previous data
sets up a system for recording what is stored where on the disk
checks the disk for physical and magnetic errors.

A quick format skips the check for errors, so it is a much faster process. You can quick format a disk only if it was already formatted. When you suspect there may be a problem with a disk, you will have to do a full format to find out. Be cautious about using quick formats since you will be skipping an important safety check.

Once the card is formatted the first time a quick format is possible. But the time difference required to quick vs. full format of a 2GB microSD card on my system is about 10s. I think I can wait for the full format and always do...

But to answer your question, will it still work? It certainly should.

striderx

 

[enigmaindex]

Well striderx summed it all up perfectly but yeah the size of your Micro SD is small, so the time differance between a quick and a full is not alot so waiting the extra time isnt too much trouble.