I had seen posts at oesf here and here indicating some Sandisk SD cards, the other brand I was considering buying, were not reliable on sl5500's, so decided to try a 512MB SD Veritech Card from http://geeks.com at the incredible price of about $7.
The card has a classy red-green-blue label on it, with yellow control numbers etched on the back of it's classic navy blue body.
The yellow etchings at the bottom of the back of the card:
6451AG 512M 025H1
Made in Taiwan
There also is a yellow control number along the right edge of the card.
First thing I did was run "df" and then "fsck.vfat" and "badblocks" on it. There were no bad blocks found, and output of "df" was
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mmcda1 488704 16 488688 0% /usr/mnt.rom/card
I accidentally erased the output, of fsck.vfat and fdisk when I attempted to add more information to the file about the reformatting I did, but wrote down the results, and they did not look good. As you can see above, "df" only found 488704 kbytes, and fdisk or fsck.vfat could not read the final cluster.
So, if you need a full 512MB, beware of special deals on this brand. I reformatted it to ext2, with 950 MB in partition 1 and chose the default (20 MB) in partition 2, and ended up with 452.8M in Partition 1. fdisk warned me that the card now had "62 unallocated sectors".
"df" on the card is now:
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/mmcda1 463636 13 439685 0% /usr/mnt.rom/card
And fdisk shows:
bash-2.05# fdisk -l /dev/mmcda Disk /dev/mmcda: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 970 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/mmcda1 1 950 478768+ 83 Linux /dev/mmcda2 951 970 10080 82 Linux swap bash-2.05#
I am now testing the card's reliability. I have been having trouble using the swap, but it's my first experience with swap and may have nothing to do with card integrity. If I find any more serious problems with the card, other than the above, I will post that additional information.
If you want to know more about my adventure in learning about swap, check out archive.org's copy of the following thread from the former tyrannozaurus.com. Scroll about halfway down the page to the comment that starts with "This has made me think if":
Archived copy of http://www.tyrannozaurus.com/?q=node/983
ADDENDUM: I finally gave up on using swap as it requires having more free space in internal memory than I have on my Zaurus. However, I am continuing to occasionally use the Veritech card without having any major issues.
sdjf
Revised August 15, 2010