- November 12, 2010 6:17 pm
We’ve already seen several instances of new Samsung Focus owners going against Microsoft’s best wishes and voiding their warranties by installing their own microSD cards. Now, voiding a warranty by replacing an SD card sounds ridiculous. (That’s because it is.) But voided warranties be damned, people want more storage. And that lust for more is starting to highlight some very big problems with Windows Phone 7, especially pertaining to external storage.
We already know Microsoft’s stance — that we wait for “Certified” SD cards to be released before cramming them into our WP7 devices. However, it’s not a matter of SD Classes as one would think. Engadget has already managed to fry an SD card of their own after attempting a swap in their Samsung Focus. Even more scary however, is the verbiage found in documentation on Samsung’s website:
A microSD card inserted into a Windows Phone 7 device and integrated into the device’s file system is intended to be a permanent modification to the device. Once a microSD card has been integrated into a Windows Phone 7 device’s file system, it will no longer be readable or writable on any other devices such as computers, cameras, printers, and so on. This includes an inability to format the microSD card for use in these devices. Improper use (including inserting or removing) of microSD cards on Windows Phone 7 devices may result in one or more of the following…
Clearly, Microsoft and/or Samsung dropped the ball big time. Under no circumstances should any OS or phone change an SD card so much that it is rendered useless (read: no more read/write ability) on all other gadgets/computers so much so that you can’t even reformat it.
Any other WP7/Samsung Focus owners care to chime in?
Even though Windows 7 is the current go-to option for Windows OS’s, may people for many reasons still rely on XP day in and day out to get their work done. Being the fact that XP itself is inching towards a decade old, at some point compatibility issues will arise. And speak of the devil, a new issue is in fact cropping up. It all has to do with hard drives and hard drive formats. It’s really a pretty simple thing — new hard drives have 4k sectors, old drives (pre-Windows XP era) have 512B.
The reason for the huge jump is that back in the day, 512B sectors was perfect for 10-100GB hard drives, but now that low end drives are even pushing 500GB and top-o-the line drives are soaring up to 2TB means we need something more efficient. I say efficient because with all of those little 512b sectors required a considerable amount of extra storage space for error codes. (Even wonder why so much of your hard drive capacity magically disappears after formatting?)
That new expanded 4k sector size means more space for actual storage on new drives and overall more efficient and speedy performance. For XP users, the “fun” begins. In order for XP to use drives formatted with the new 4k size, the drive will have to emulate the old 512B sectors. For reads, their won’t be any real noticeable difference. It’s only when you get all write happy that you could see up to a 10% decrease in drive performance as the emulation mode more or less makes it so that each 1 and 0 has to be written twice. All in all, only those building custom computers with more performance oriented goals will probably notice the speed decrease.
The simple solution is again, upgrade to Windows Vista or 7. But not everyone can do that. Be warned though, whether you’re ready or not, this new format will become standard by 2011. Get ready.
BBC
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It is no secret that the U.S. Government is sorely behind on the times technologically speaking. Just make friends with a search engine for a few minutes and you can find article after article on poor government policies concerning technology, technological standards, or anything else tech related that I just can’t think of right now. The latest “leak” of information is actually a tad funny, though scary all at the same time. Yet again, it centers around people who aren’t exactly the greatest (mentally speaking) around computers.
