Outside of Arch BTW memes, yours is the first I've seen an somone unprompted describe themeselves as an Arch user. I gues it does really happen.

The “protected area” was probably reserved for DRM keys for video distribution, an envisioned use case that never took off for SD cards, and hasn’t been relevant for at least a decade.

https://www.sdcard.org/developers/sd-standard-overview/conte...

Sadly it doesn’t seem to be able to fix the several SD cards killed by the raspberry pis I have.

While this tool saved my beef a couple of times, I found out that zeroing the device (partially or fully) with dd and partitioning it with gparted (the CLI tool) did also wonders.

I had a wonky HIKSemi USB flash drive, which turned out to be partitioned in a very unaligned way, and neither the flash nor the controller liked that much. Doing it manually and making sure it's aligned (which gparted does automatically) converted it to a very dependable drive.

It works on really old versions of Windows too, even XP I think.

afaik, thats so the device can format the card in its preferred filesystem. Instead of pestering the user (who may only use their computer as a "Facebook machine") to make sure they format the card to X specification, the device can just do that for them. Outside of "that", the device isn't doing anything special during format (unless its using the "secure" bits of a SD card, which pretty much no one does).

However, as at least some of the devices users will be Windows users, it does tend to limit the FS choices to FAT, exFAT or NTFS if the user expects to treat the card as removable storage to transfer files, like in a digital camera, so the issue is pretty much moot. Unless MS are still charging royalties on FAT and the device manufacturer wants to avoid those.

These days with people mainly using their phones, and the transfer of files being done over the air, allows device manufacturers more freedom with their SD card FS choice.

Someone actually reverse engineered the formatting and made a open source tool that does the equivalent on Linux: https://github.com/profi200/sdFormatLinux

It's also an organization created by Panasonic, SanDisk, and Toshiba. The entire FOSS scene are technically irrelevant to those companies - you might think software like Linux Kernel would be pretty important, but that tech is available to everybody, which makes it just a constant.

Also, this tool exists to fix card errors at field and reduce support costs, not to advocate their superior jutsu of formatting. The latter is not the point.

I think one of the reasons for the proprietary licensing is that this software is built with Tuxera IP. As is typical for a mostly B2B software company, Tuxera wants to keep potentially advantageous features and optimizations proprietary.

Doubly idiotic since just running it under strace and feeding that to a LLM would get you an open source version in no time..

How can you license the correct formatting process and create a sweet recurring value stream for the shareholders of the SD Card Association if you open source this?

Are you a communist? /s

Jokes aside. I'd love to see this standardized and widely available with a document why SD cards needs to be formatted this way, but I think everyone is afraid that someone's patent or secret or something will be revealed, and its library form is probably, really a revenue stream for them.

Shortsighted, I may say.

It can discard with the proper SD commands (use `--discard`), if your SD adapter supports that. So not with USB card readers, but with many built-in SD card slots. The main reason to use this formatter instead of the OS built-in formatter (or mkfs) is that this creates the correct type of file system (FAT or exFAT depending on card size) and uses correct allocation sizes etc. for devices expecting a factory-formatted card.

https://www.sdcard.org/press/thoughtleadership/the-sd-memory... has more details, and a comparison to disk utility format. There is also this open source implementation https://github.com/profi200/sdFormatLinux

The main difference seems to be stuff about block size and alignment.

>Technically speaking, the SD Memory Card Formatter optimizes the layout of data structures on a SD memory card in accordance with flash parameters defined by the SDA. This includes placing the partition at the correct offset for the internal flash layout of the card, properly aligning the FAT and the cluster heap (an area containing the file and directory data) to internal flash boundaries, and minimizing wear-leveling, while maximizing read/write performance.

>Manufacturers of small embedded devices most often expect a file system to be formatted to the above stated parameters, so they optimize their relatively simple system implementations based on the assumption that the file system is already optimized for the internal flash layout.

I don't know enough about flash memory to understand why SSDs don't have this issue. Presumably they use more advanced controllers that just hide all this

The Windows/Mac page can be found at https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/ . Caveat:

Note: If you have a Mac with Apple silicon, e.g. M1, you might be asked to install Rosetta in order to open the SD Card Formatter.

It's there. The website just has poor navigation & OP linked specifically to the Linux version for whatever reason.