128GB card?

[Edward M. Grant]

Has anyone used a Kingston 128GB card with the A118C?

Seems to work with the Street Guardian version, according to posts in that forum, and I have a Street Guardian camera on order to replace the front camera in my car. But I'll be keeping the A118C in the rear.

64GB just isn't enough to retain all the interesting footage on longer trips where I don't have a laptop available to copy it off (and don't remember to hit the button to save it).

 

[jokiin]

you can try it and see, it is a different chipset so I'm not sure if that will be an issue or not

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Thanks. I was forgetting you used a different chipset, too.

One of the online stores I use has the cards for 25% off at the moment, so maybe I'll just buy two and cross my fingers .

 

[Gibson99]

worst case you can probably use it in your phone or something... my previous phone claimed it only supported a max of 32gb sd card, but i had no issue using a 64 in it.

 

[montythebrave]

Can the A118 without capacitor accept a higher than 32gb sd card? whats the max?

 

[Gibson99]

Can the A118 without capacitor accept a higher than 32gb sd card? whats the max?

I've used two different 64gb cards in my regular, non-capacitor a118 without a problem, but you do need to be using firmware from at least December 2014, and format the card in the camera itself. I don't have any cards larger than 64gb to test with though, sorry.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

Yeah, 64GB works. Anyway, I ordered two 128GB cards, so I'll try it out.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

They arrived today, so I installed one in my rear camera. The camera said 'Card Error', so I formatted it from the menu, and it didn't give an error, but didn't work (as expected). When I plugged the card into my Linux laptop, there was no recognizable file system.

I then formatted it in the laptop (sudo mkfs.vfat -s 64 /dev/sdb1), set the disk label and created the CARDV directory, plugged it into the camera, and the camera is recording on it. Since the rear camera fell off the car in the hot weather and is currently on my kitchen table, I won't know for a while whether it actually records properly, but it at least got as far as recording a video of the sandwich toaster when it booted up.

The Street Guardian camera should arrive in the next few days, so I'll be putting the other 128GB card in there. Don't want to lose it trying to swap it into the existing front camera in the car.

 

[jokiin]

if you want to use the 128gb card in our camera it needs to be formatted FAT32 with 32kb cluster size, we have tools for that in Windows but I'm assuming you can do that in Linux from the terminal

 

[Edward M. Grant]

if you want to use the 128gb card in our camera it needs to be formatted FAT32 with 32kb cluster size, we have tools for that in Windows but I'm assuming you can do that in Linux from the terminal

Yeah, that's right. That's what the mkfs.vfat command should do; I'm pretty sure the 64 sectors on the command line translates into a 32k cluster size.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

So, I tried the same trick for formatting the other 128GB card for the Street Guardian camera after it turned up today, and it still said Card Error. Swapped the cards between the two cameras, and then the Street Guardian worked but the A118 didn't, so it clearly wasn't the camera.

I reformatted it again, and now it's working. I wonder if Linux is putting some hidden files on there when it mounts the card, which confuse the cameras? The second time it didn't auto-mount, so it had never been directly accessed by the operating system.

 

[DT MI]

...I wonder if Linux is putting some hidden files on there when it mounts the card, which confuse the cameras?....

That would not surprise me at all. Anytime you move a device from one OS to another 'surprises' can happen (and a dash cam is a computer with an OS).

If I take the SD card out of my camera directly to my Windows machine everything is OK both on the computer and when I put it back in the camera. If I take the same card and put it in my phone or tablet (both Android) it's fine when put back in the camera but from that point forward when I put it in a Windows machine the OS wants to scan it for errors - something that did not happen before putting it in the Android device.

Many reports of Apple OS's not playing nice as well but since I have a serious case of 'fruit aversion' I'll never know that first hand.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

One thing I have noticed is that if the USB disconnects while I'm plugged into the camera, Linux tends to leave the 'dirty' bit set on the FAT, which is probably what causes Windows to run a disk scan. It doesn't seem to worry the camera, but I'm always careful to try to 'eject' it from the OS before removing the USB cable... and reformat it in the camera afterwards if I don't want any of the other footage on there. Of course that won't work with the 128GB cards, since the camera can't format them with current firmware.