MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi fellow Mister enthusiasts!

I have everything I need to assemble a complete Mister setup except the micro sd card. I want to get a 512Gb card but confused as to what type.
I've never needed a micro sd card before. I am unsure about what type is compatible with the Mister. I would genuinely appreciate any help you can provide. Thanks!

I was looking at several cards listed below.

SanDisk 512GB Extreme Plus UHS-I microSDXC

SanDisk Ultra 512 GB Class 10/UHS-I (U1) microSDXC

Samsung Memory 512 GB Evo Plus

Stuff like SD2SNES can be a bit picky on SDCards and more with MSU-1 support. Even have a page dedicated to confirmed working/non-working cards, but never seen anything of that nature for MiSTer or any talk about it in the community so guess it's not very picky at all.

I have the SanDisk 200GB Ultra MicroSDXC UHS-I and no problems.

I use Sandisk Ultra cards, and I've never had a problem.
I have heard about other people who had problems (on other hardware) with Samsung cards, because they would stall at times while the internal controller would perform functions behind the scenes (such as erase).

Another vote for Sandisk Ultras, they're easy to find and they worked well for me over the years.

Long story short, almost any Micro SD card is good as long as is from a known good manufacturer and seller.

darksakul wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 5:19 am Long story short, almost any Micro SD card is good as long as is from a known good manufacturer and seller.

Which means not buying them from Amazon. They've had issues with cards that get sent in from their third-party sellers, and since they just toss them all in the same bin with other sellers' merchandise (as long as it's nominally the same product), counterfeit cards get mixed in there sometimes.

Thank you for all the replies everyone. I'm going to buy one of the two Sandisk I asked about. I am definitely not buying it from Amazon, with their counterfeit problem.

Amazon is the only place I get SD cards from. I refuse to buy SD cards from Best Buy or Office Depo.
Pay attention to who the seller is, Amazon isn't a store just a listing service (like eBay or Etsy).
All my cards come from ether Amazon it self or a reliable 3rd party.

I appreciate that Samsung actually gives you the full advertised storage size. Most other brands give you the short end of the stick. SanDisk is usually pretty good too. I just got burned on a Lexar 512GB that only have 460gb usable which was not suitable for my purposes. I really wish they would be required to advertise the actual end capacity.

darksakul wrote: ↑Wed May 27, 2020 2:56 am Amazon is the only place I get SD cards from. I refuse to buy SD cards from Best Buy or Office Depo.
Pay attention to who the seller is, Amazon isn't a store just a listing service (like eBay or Etsy).
All my cards come from ether Amazon it self or a reliable 3rd party.

Yeah, that's the thing. If you check that article, you'll see that Amazon just tosses all the sellers' items into the same bin (including their own) when sellers send stuff to an Amazon warehouse to be able to be sent out via Prime shipping. People have even gotten counterfeit products that were shipped from and sold by Amazon themselves.

The problem isn't checking who's selling it. Or, at least, not just that. The problem is that Amazon's inventory management makes that impossible unless you buy from a seller that ships it themselves, and a lot of those seem to be fly-by-night companies.

That's not to say that buying a card from Amazon guarantees that it'll be counterfeit, but it is a very real risk.

In my case I have an order for 2 MicroSDs of different brand, capacity and speed to see the concrete results since MiSTer starts:

https://www.kingston.com/latam/memory-c ... ifications (32GB 100mb r/w)
https://intercompras.com/p/memoria-micr ... s-i-142799 (64GB 80mb r/w)

As several have already said, SanDisk and its Ultra models seem to be one of the best and most stable models to use in our MiSTer.

I use the sd card that came with de10-nano itself, as games are on a remote share. where i use sd cards, whether its a 2ds, mega sd or everdrive, i just use the cheapest sandisk i can find new, usually sandisk ultra. if you think you are going to A LOT of writes to the sd card, consider an endurance version instead. but if you are just go to put all the roms there at once and then just carry with system and core updates, any sandisk will do

figured I'd post up an experience

I bought this guy here since even though it looked sketch, $60 felt worth a shot

it worked on my computer though it was fussy about working with the installer at times, but I can't get the MiSTer to boot up with it at all

gonna be returning it since it's probably a fake or something (gonna test it anyways lol) and getting a 512GB PNY from Best Buy since that's the cheapest I saw

I'll let y'all know how that goes

so the PNY confirmed works with the mister but it only lets me use 460 GB instead of actually 512GB

it's ok though because being $89.99 it's still more GB/$ than the other 512GB options

VickiViperZabel wrote: ↑Sat May 30, 2020 5:07 pm so the PNY confirmed works with the mister but it only lets me use 460 GB instead of actually 512GB

Most of the difference is because storage vendors (and the SI) say one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 (10^9) bytes because the "giga-" prefix generally means 1,000,000,000, whereas RAM vendors (and most programmers) say one gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (2^30) bytes because that's the size of a 30-bit binary address space. That conversion gets you down to 472, so 460 still seems a bit low. On a system drive that could easily be accounted for by things like boot/recovery partitions or reserved space (common on Unix-like file systems), but I'm not sure why it would happen on removable media.

I had recently similar experience with 32GB sandisk, where few MB were unallocated out-of-the-box. deleting the single partition and creating new one helped in my case. might be same for VickiViperZabel as well

I’ve got a standard Sandisk 128gb and it’s working just fine.

I woudnˋt buy such a big card. They are much to expensive and sooner or later (most times sooner) your card will die or even with a 512gb you will run out is space. SD cards donˋt have the live expectancy of a hard drive! Buy 16 or 32gb and store your roms, games etc on a network share or a usb hard drive.

I'm using a 512GB SanDisk Ultra, picked it up for a discount here in Germany last month, at the moment I still have a lot of space free. I prefer a big card over sticks, hdds and network shares as it is more portable.

That said, in reality this card is not that fast in writing, so filling up likely will take some time but who cares if you have enough space to just let everything sit there.

For my arcade machine MiSTer I'll go the network share route.

I am using a “Lexar High Performance 633x 512GB” card and it’s working perfectly. It was noticeably cheaper than the Sandisk equivalents in Amazon UK.

EvilRyu wrote: ↑Wed Jun 03, 2020 10:19 am I am using a “Lexar High Performance 633x 512GB” card and it’s working perfectly. It was noticeably cheaper than the Sandisk equivalents in Amazon UK.

Yeah but what's your actual formatted capacity on that card? Noticeably cheaper because you're short 32gb. That's a whole other as card!

Interesting read (both article and the PDF).
Although more important for flashcart user then mister user.
https://www.retrorgb.com/mdfourier-sd-card-testing.html

Does it make any difference in performance when choosing a SanDisk Extreme or Extreme Pro instead of Ultra? Sometimes there are good daily deals.

I am using a 32gb mcirosd kingston class 10 100mb/s

There would be any difference if using a 32gb sandisk class 10 80mb/s speed?

Every microSD card I've thrown at it works fine. For reliability nothing really beats the Sandisk Ultra's, but the MiSTer is more fault tolerant than something like the everdrives and ODE's. But I usu primarily Samsung EVO Select and have not had any problems.

Only microSD's I've ever had problems with any sort of thing have been Kingston brand. Personally I avoid those now, had problems with two of them.