64GB micro SDXC card /vs/ SDHC card slot under Vista?

[hellosailor]

I'm trying to use a 64GB micro SDXC card which actually will live in an Android smartphone. The phone is perfectly happy to format it (format type unspecified) and use it just like a micro SDHC card. But when I put the card into an SD card adapter and put that into my T61P running Vista (fully patched), the laptop says the card is unrecognized and must be formatted. And then regardless of the format type (FAT32 or exFAT) and the allocation unit size, quick or full format, Vista still sees only a 32GB (29GB) SD card.

I've tried other software including the SD card org's own SDXC formatter, which is supposed to deal with 64GB+ SDXC cards specifically. Same thing, no joy.

So I'm wondering...could the SD card reader itself, in the T61P, be limited to recognizing 32GB SDHC cards?

I know, I can push data to the card via a USB cable, but Vista shows the transfer rate is literally 10x slower that way, and that translates into HOURS. The phone and computer are both USB2.0 supposedly, but the SD card slot is fully 10x faster on smaller cards. Now if I can only teach it to understand "64"...

[rumbero]

So I'm wondering...could the SD card reader itself, in the T61P, be limited to recognizing 32GB SDHC cards?

I can't really answer this questions as i have never tried any SDHC card larger than 16GB so far. But maybe the following links might be of use for you: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail. ... MIGR-68053

[hellosailor]

Thanks, Rumbero.

The Ricoh driver somehow was still 2006 vintage evne though the system has been "fully" updated on a regular basis. I manually pushed the most recent Ricoh 4-in-1 driver, which is apparently still 2008 although the SD device also still shows a 2006 Microsoft driver. Web pages indicate that Vista sp1 and all later Windows OSes will support sdxc natively, so I'm left to guess that the Lenovo driver, or the hardware, isn't properly supporting it.

Before the update, Vista insisted it could reformat the card as a 29GB (32GB) drive in FAT32. After the update--and confirmed and a later model HP Vista computer--the OS wants to reformat it as "unknown capacity" in plain FAT. Which would be a mistake, FAT instead of FAT32 or exFAT.

[later]
No joy, even after the driver update, the Ricoh 4-in-1 SD card reader cannot format or recognize a 64GB SDXC card. Looks like it will have to be put in a USB adapter.

[ro6ot]

probably no longer relevant for you, but I just came upon this thread, & it occurs to me ~apologies if this is no-brainer or already ruled out~ but could it be the micro-to-fullsize-SD adapter that's the culprit?

[hellosailor]

Could be. But AFAIK they are all built to the same standard (SDHC, SDXC, both the same) so while one might be defective, the three I tried all work fine--with SDHC cards. The failure of SDHC devices/drivers to support SDXC cards is pretty well documented, but the adapters are never mentioned as a problem.

[trismarck]

I confirm this also happens on X61T. When I was testing SXDC compatibility, I remember that at some point, I was able to format the card so that Total Commander saw it as a 64GB one. Unfortunately, when copying data to the card, the data that exceeded the 32GB limit boundary was copied at the end of the card (erasing the existing data). After that, I've put the card in an SXDC-compatible slot and all of the data on the card was corrupted.

//edit: Windows XP SP3 with exFAT patch applied.