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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

As with previous capacities, another use case is to have your entire music library available in your phone. I use one of the previous 200 GB uSD cards with my whole music library. It's nice to have everything available everywhere I go. Now even those with >200 but <400 GB of music are able to do the same.

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"another use case is to have your entire music library available in your phone."

Unfortunately, almost all phones continue to support microSD cards "up to 32 GB". Some will (reportedly) work with 64 GB cards, but if I understand correctly, others need hacks/tweaks to access >32 GB cards ...

I didn't realize this was an issue. Does this include flagship phones or is it mostly lower- and mid-range?

From experience, the Galaxy S7 supports at least 128GB (a quick search returns a 256GB max). S6 didn't support microSD, S5 supports 128GB, S4 supports 64GB, S3 supports 64GB.

sdxc has been in the spec since 2010. Anything that supports over 32GB (sdxc) can support up to 2TB with no hardware changes. I still have an S4 and use a 128GB card, but I've got a custom ROM. Most of the "up to" values for support are simply the biggest card that was available when the device was released, not the biggest the device can read. That's almost always going to be 2TB, the maximum that exFAT can support.

My 2 year old Sony Xperia works quite happily with a 128 GB card. A quick survey of recent (2017) models of Samsung, Sony, Motorola, Huawei, and Xiaomi on GSM Arena shows that they all take up to 256 GB (with Motorola being the exception at 128GB). This also seems to be the case for older Samsung phones I looked at.

Looks like you're in luck.

My phone and tablet work fine with 128GB cards. The phone is a Samsung Galaxy S4 running Android 7.1.1, the tablet is an Amazon Fire HD 5th Gen. Any device that supports sdxc cards must support up to 2TB. The exFAT filesystem is required for these, so you can't use FAT32 anymore. sdxc host devices started coming out in 2010, pretty much everything that uses sd cards these days has support for them.

FAT32 has an individual filesize limit of 4GB, but otherwise works fine for a 2TB partition:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/images/stories/reviews/silicon-power_...

Yes, but SDXC drivers don't necessarily support FAT32 on SDXC cards. The spec only requires exFAT. SDHC used FAT32.

That's interesting. It seems the SD specs (which include SDXC) are mandating a specific filesystem. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#SDXC

Nevertheless, in order to be fully compliant with the SDXC card specification, many SDXC-capable host devices are firmware-programmed to expect exFAT on cards larger than 32 GB. Consequently, they may not accept SDXC cards reformatted as FAT32, even if the device supports FAT32 on smaller cards (for SDHC compatibility).

That seems like a gross "abstraction layer violation" to me --- like making SATA controllers which work with SATA6 HDDs only when formatted with NTFS. The filesystem should have nothing to do with SD, which simply implements a block device abstraction. No doubt Microsoft was involved in this ridiculousness...

since they receive patent licensing on exFAT, you can bet that! :)

which is the same reason that there is no implementation in the kernel, only fuse. ugh.

"SD" is basically the name of a standard stack, not a particular layer. You can reformat an SDHC card to not be FAT32, but then it won't be an SDHC card any more.

There is a point to this: SD cards are used in all sorts of low-level embedded applications, with firmware that uses very inflexible (usually assembler) code to address the card. The assumptions about the SD wire protocol + the FAT32 filesystem + even the particular location of the FAT table on disk are all knotted together in these devices.

Because of this, it's not even just that SDHC requires FAT32; SDHC requires FAT32 done with a specific formatting tool released by the SD standards group. Because your OS might put the FAT anywhere, but the tool puts it in exactly one place, and that's the place that dumb embedded devices expect to find it.

And exFAT is various sorts of patent encumbered, as I understand it.

My Lg G4 has no issue qith a 200gb microSD card.

Nowadays phones are dropping SD card support because they want everyone to touch the 'cloud'.

Are there any battery cases for iPhones that could use this? I know it's possible to have SD card readers over lightning, and it would be pretty cool to have tons of extra space for photos, music, or video. iOS would lock you out of certain use cases, but there are probably some that would make this worthwhile. So many people have big battery cases, and adding this in wouldn't take much (and would be a killer differentiator).

"Now even those with >200 but <400 GB of music are able to do the same."

Some of us are already living in that future by using an mp3 player with two uSD slots :)

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/xduoo-x3-dsd-24bit-192khz-cs...

I have about 175GB of music, but a lot of that is flac. If I were putting it on my phone, considering its DAC and the fact I'm probably using bluetooth headphones I wouldn't hesitate to make all that 96kbit Opus instead and have no recognizable quality loss.

In my experiments in the past I was shrinking 80GB to about 15GB.

So if anyone has a huge music collection, you can still probably fit it on your phone without going crazy on the sd card. Just checking my collection is 2 months uninterrupted runtime right now.

Seconded, Opus is amazing. Hell, 96kbps is probably overkill for a phone, the codec is that good.

Opus is amazing. Also your DAC and phone sound processing don't matter when using Bluetooth. It's digital straight to the headphones

Phones support Opus now? Or is the decode entirely in the CPU? Phones have more than enough oomph to do it, but you'll probably lose some battery life that way.

Trying to find any info on this is next to impossible. I'd still be really surprised if modern SoCs were shipping hardware mp3 decoders still though, and if they do, they probably support Opus since almost all VOIP data uses it now.

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