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IV. Formatting MicroSD Cards
The Recorder supports MicroSD memory cards of all sizes and classes, but
has performance requirements for cards (see III.6-III.8). The MicroSD card must
be formatted on a personal computer before use in the Recorder. The Recorder
supports the following file systems: FAT (FAT12, FAT16, MS-DOS) and FAT32.
It does not
support exFAT, NTFS, or any other file systems.
When formatting, use a cluster size of 65,536 bytes (64K) or the maximum available
for your card. This will improve the performance of the Recorder and extend the life
of the card. During operation, the Recorder produces files of up to 20 clusters, which
totals 1.3MB with a cluster size of 64K. Such files typically hold 15-25 minutes of data
recording. If a smaller cluster size is used, the Recorder will have to create new files
more often, increasing the number of calls to the file system.
The FAT32 file system can be used on disks up to 2048 GB. Microsoft Windows,
Linux and Mac OS X do not restrict work with files on memory cards of any size
with the FAT32 file system.
However, in Microsoft Windows, there is an artificial restriction, so you cannot select
the FAT32 file system for memory cards of 64 GB or more in the formatting program
supplied with the operating system. This limitation is the consequence of Microsoft’s
promotion of its new exFAT file system. So, to format large cards in Windows,
you will need to use a third-party freeware formatting program, like the one supplied
by Ridgecrop Consultants Ltd:
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/guiformat.htm
In Linux or Mac OS X operating systems, there is no such limitation, and you can use
the OS utility to format cards of any size.
