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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be proprietary but it's developed by Tuxera, the same lads who created and maintain the NTFS drivers for Linux.
SD Cards have computers inside of them. Security conscious users will be really worried using a blob for their stuff.
Would be an interesting project, I have no idea how you could reprogram them though.
How is this better than dd(1)? Does it "format" the card with any specific filesystem or just overwrite/erase its contents?
> SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards have a “Protected Area” for SD Card security purposes. The SD Memory Card Formatter does not format the protected area in the SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards. The protected area shall be formatted by an appropriate PC application or SD host devices that provide SD security function.
I've always formatted SD cards like any other block device. This page mentions a secure section of the card that can somehow reduce performance if you don't treat it specially? What is this security section for, and do standard UNIXy partitioning tools have the ability to handle them properly, or do I have to use this proprietary(?) tarball if I want good SD performance?
IIRC there is a reserved area in the beginning of th SD cards flash which is used for internal housekeeping. When this area is overwritten/formatted the card is bricked. [add] The size depends on the size of the card. I think it is around 32KB on cards with a capacity under 2GB.
In some SD cards you can use proprietary magical commands to communicate with the firmware and update it or ask it to mess with the hidden sections for you, but those options aren't exposed to any disk copy tool I know of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC there is a reserved area in the beginning of th SD cards flash which is used for internal housekeeping. When this area is overwritten/formatted the card is bricked. [add] The size depends on the size of the card. I think it is around 32KB on cards with a capacity under 2GB.
I'm dubious about this claim, I have completely destroyed the partition table and mkfs on the raw device...
Console hacking forum users such as gbatemp stress the use of "Panasonic SD formatter" when formatting SD cards as FAT32 and guiformat for exFAT, I don't know if there is a reason behind this advice or if it's just cargo culting.
I don't think they do anything that other formatting tools can't do, but they do make the alignment much easier by defaulting to the right options.
How is this better than dd(1)? Does it "format" the card with any specific filesystem or just overwrite/erase its contents?
The answer is in the third paragraph. > SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards have a “Protected Area” for SD Card security purposes. The SD Memory Card Formatter does not format the protected area in the SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards. The protected area shall be formatted by an appropriate PC application or SD host devices that provide SD security function.
[1] Never heard of it and I've erased and recreated partition tables on SD cards multiple times with no "bricking"; maybe it's a feature of cards supplied with "encryption software"?
I am betting this came out because of Valve steam deck popularity. A linux based device that uses sdcards