yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Focus General] hyperzulu:
I thought the card was formatted as exFAT. This should be happening when you three button reset. It says formatting when I do this on my phone. Looks like it does a quick table wipe, but the cluster size would be part of this format procedure, destroying whatever you've done before the card was joined to the phone.

I guess the marketplace is really glitchy, but the random seizing even when on the home screen is not cool. If I wanted a slow phone, I would stick with my Nokia 5800.

This is not even normal Joe consumer friendly at this point, so MS is missing its mark. And I know Joe could use more than the seven gigs the phone has left over. On the one hand, the manufacturers could have added more memory, but they needed to keep the phones at an attractive price. On the other hand, MS could have just supported SD cards properly from the onset. Hopefully the certified cards will work... or MS updates the OS soon to remedy the problem.
[Focus General] desolateone1:
I bought a Kingston 32gb Class 4 card, and unfortunately I lose all my data after a hard reset... :(
[Focus General] rruffman:
hard or soft reset? as a hard reset is suspose to make you loose all of the data.. its the soft reset that people are speaking of...
[Focus General] desolateone1:
Sorry, I meant soft reset, but now I can't even use the card after a hard reset (it only reports 15mb now)

argh... :mad:
[Focus General] FishFaceMcGee:
Sounds like what happened to me after I used a SanDisk 32GB for a few days. I think, contrary to statements by AT&T and Samsung, 32GB cards don't work with the Focus.
[Focus General] MKohlman:
I've had another 10 days to play with the Sandisk 32G setup (with 20GB now loaded on the Focus). and I've noticed a behaviour which has been very consistent now.

I only have troubles with reading the card on the Focus when running it on Battery. if it is on battery and I go to Playback music or video, I will get freezes or hesitations in the WMA or WMV files, especially the longer it runs. I will also get occasionaly reboots (with no loss of data) when the Focus is on battery only.

When plugged in and charging I have seen none of these problems, indeed today when I started using my Focus for music playback, as I got into the second album and began to get hesitations in the playback, so I plugged it into the Charger and then played back 8 albums over a 6 hour period with no drop offs, no hesitations, and no resets. This behavious has been consistent and duplicatable for me and makes me wonder if there is an issue with power-draw and the larger 32GB Cards? Or does the Focus handle power management in some way different when on battery vs when on current?

If so it woulds seem like this could be adjusted in some manner, albeit at the expense of battery life for the more highly loaded storage cards.

Is anyone else seeing this?

- MEK
[Focus General] Ren13B:
FYI, I've started to have slow downs once I loaded more than 10GB of music with a 32GB Kingston Class 4 card but no random reboots or data loss. They seem completely random but when it happens the phone is completely unresponsive. After a few seconds it starts working again.
[Focus General] krazers:
Here's my story:

1) First loaded my Adata 16gb class 6 card. Had typical issues on reboot.

2) Bought 16gb Kingston class 4 from newegg. Loaded 12gb of music, app, pictures and then noticed significant slow down in launching of apps.

3) Went to AT&T store and used corp discount to buy 32gb sandisk class 2. Loaded 12gb of music, app, pictures. Performance is very good. I haven't had any issues on reboots. Has only been 6 hours since I installed it, so I will keep an eye on its performance.
[Focus General] krazers:
Coincidently, 1 minute after writing my last post, my phone restarted on its own and I lost all my settings. Back to 15mb.

Returning the 32gb sandisk class 2 card.
[Focus General] TOA Duck:
Well, my 16gb class 2 sandisk went down yesterday. I had all but 4 gigs filled on it and my phone rebooted and i was left with the dreaded 15 mb left. I don't understand what happened. I'm filling it up again though to see if it was a fluke.
[Focus General] rhart20:
That's funny. My sandisk 16gb class 2 also went down yesterday. I removed it and plan to get a class 4 instead. I had no problems until yesterday afternoon. Has anyone had issues with the sandisk 16gb class 4.
[Focus General] jeffgeno:
I can't speak for the SanDisk 16GB cards, but my 8GB Class 4 SanDisk has been flawless since I installed it almost a week ago. No slowdowns, no reboots, no anything. I have about 10GB of music on there, so it's been using the card since then.
[Focus General] kerbyk:
Sandisk 16gig class 2 unstable

Hey gang, we should probably get the Sabdisk 16 gig class 2 of tohe "good" list...after a week, with 15+ gigs of music on it, mine just reset itself, all data lost, 15 gigs reported...pulled the card and have downgraded to 8 until there's some Samsug-blessed cards.

k
[Focus General] emjee87:
Gonna give it a few more days to see if it's a widespread problem. I've had mine filled to the point that there's only 2GB free, and I haven't had any problems for the past week. It seems like an isolated incident, but if more reports start popping up this week, I'll move it over.
[Focus General] desolateone1:
I've decided I'm just going to wait until there is a solution to this or there are cards out that are guaranteed to work.
[Focus General] FishFaceMcGee:
At this point, I'm basically waiting for someone at Samsung to give me a link to somewhere I can buy the "certified" SanDisk 8GB card. The model number is supposed to be SDSDQ-8192-1024, but I can find no reference to it ANYWHERE outside of tweets from Samsung Support staff to users.

Another thought: so what happens if (when?) I get the certified card and it craps out? I mean, clearly there has to be cards that are reliable more often than not, otherwise HTC phones wouldn't have them as the main storage. So who do I get to yell at if the card screws up?
[Focus General] emjee87:
Just had a random reboot with my 16GB class 2 SanDisk card in. Filled nearly to capacity for about a week, first time occurrence (at least to my knowledge). Will report back if there are any more instances or if it was a fluke.
[Focus General] dhan911:
I had a random reboot today - first since I got my Focus exactly two weeks ago. I was opened Marketplace, pressed the search key and boom! the next thing I see is the samsung logo and the phone was rebooting!

Just for the record: :p I have no card in my phone and haven't put any for trials. Just built-in stuff.

It's going to be difficult to blame cards for all problems. Marketplace has been buggy on me, few times it has crashed to the start screen but this was first hard crash.
[Focus General] hyperzulu:
Anyone care to post results of Windows Readyboost compatability on supposed working and non-working cards? I have the 16GB Kingston Class 4 card that I used on my phone until it started slowing freezing the UI randomly for a few seconds, which was a pretty noticeable change from stock phone. After taking it out and formatting it back to normal, I put it into my Windows 7 home PC and found that the card does not pass Readyboost's test.

My other 8GB card, which came with my Nokia phone, does pass. I might toss the 8GB card back in and test it out again by filling to capacity and taking note of any of the slowdowns I saw with the larger Kingston.

I'm just curious if anyone else has performed the Readyboost test and whether it was any good at indicating whether the card would work. Apparently Readyboost tests the card's random access, which seems to be the ticket for WP7.

Might test it out anyway, but if anyone has any thoughts or experience already, let me know.

Update: Loaded over 8GB of music on the phone, so it's well over the main memory now. Notice some slight pauses when I was setting up my e-mail accounts and some spots hiccup every now and then, but nowhere near annoying or long as what I experienced before. This is just quick testing... syncing my accounts, running music in all-random, looking up sites on the web, scrolling through my people hub, updating live feeds. So far, it's not bad. I imagine if it stays like this, MS updates to the core system should improve some of the speed making any random hiccups a non-issue.
[Focus General] foxbat121:
ReadyBoost test copies a test file to the card to test write speed. Since the card you take out from WP7 won't be recognized by Windows any way, there is no way to pass ReadyBoost test unless you somehow format it first?
[Focus General] FishFaceMcGee:
Correct, you would need a Nokia Symbian phone to reformat the card.
[Focus General] hyperzulu:
Right. I have my Nokia 5800 to circumvent the card lock and reformat.

This 8GB card doesn't have a name. I'm wondering if I can just buy some cards, test them in ReadyBoost and return the ones that fail before going through the hassle of formatting my phone, loading gigs of data, and finding out it doesn't work. It seems that the same model card can have different properties. Without the mfr benchmarking each one individually, we won't get true certified cards. Just wondering if RB is going to be a viable method of benchmarking. If anyone knows of another benchmarking tool for testing random access on a sd card and the numbers Microsoft recommends for the phone, I'd be interested in that too.
[Focus General] serialtoon:
So yea i tried to load the sdcard again and after i loaded up as much as i could (only 300mb left on the focus) it started to slow the phone down and the touch response was piss poor. 8GB Kingston Class 4.
[Focus General] Soundtweaker:
My Yelp app was hanging on me. Once I rebooted, it worked fine and I don't even have a memory card installed.
[Focus General] webdev511:
That almost sounds like WP7 isn't clearing buffers as efficently as it should. Tasks not shutting down and releasing memory as expected?
[Focus General] serialtoon:
so i went out and bought a 16Gb Class 2 Sandisk card. One day later and it started to make my phone studder. I think im done with this, im buying a Zune.
[Focus General] RustyGrom:
SanDisk 16GB Class 2 card from AT&T store has been having the same problems as the 32GB card did but now it's even worse... my phone won't boot with the card in so I guess I have to hard reset... again.

So yea, no card is safe! My coworker has the same SanDisk card only his is actually old and had been used in his old phone and he has not had a single problem with it. Mine has been rebooting left and right until today when it gave up the ghost. Sooooo frustrating. Microsoft needs to hurry up and release a patch!
[Focus General] serialtoon:
Ok, so my 16GB SanDisk Class 2 card took a **** and wiped my phone clean. Only 20 hours of use and it took a dump.
[Focus General] KoshKosh:
Sandisk 16gb class 4 has been cooperating. I've had it installed for four days now.

Here is what I've done so far.

I Filled it up with 15GB of music and videos.

Then I installed some apps and games to make sure they ended up on the mem card.

I have soft reset the phone a bunch of times.

For the fun of it I removed the battery while the phone was on.

I haven't encountered any problems other than the Zune synch getting significantly slower when it started hitting the memory card. Otherwise all apps seem to be running at the same speed as they were before I installed the card (If there is any slow down it's not enough to make me notice)

I'll post again if anything changes. One thing we should do as we are reporting results is stating where we got the card. I got mine from newegg. Although it is listed as a class 2 card, the packaging I got and card itself indicate it is a class 4. These kinds of things add to the confusion in an already confusing environment.

newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171386&Tpk=sandisk%2016gb%20microsdhc
[Focus General] ghaith_d:
Thank you! I have a 16gb Class 4, but I'm waiting for my Focus to come in from the states (hopefully monday *crosses fingers*) and I can't find anyone saying anything about it. Please keep me in the loop!

Cheers
[Focus General] jsgiv:
Not sure - however, I've since removed the Patriot 16GB class 4 card completely from the device due to overall performance lag. Upon reset/reformat back to "original" - the difference is even more noticeable. Quite simply there's probably a 20-30 percent overall speed lag (depending on how much you have loaded on the system, etc). Most aspects of the phone were untouched - but it did affect overall loading of the applications and was extremely noticeable with taking multiple pictures quickly.

I'd hoped that I could have more available space (mainly for music) - but it's not that big of a deal - I'd rather have a very fast/responsive phone than more space at this time. It's disappointing, but not a deal breaker as compared to my experience with the Captivate - which gave me nothing but trouble with GPS accuracy (*when* it was able to finally lock) and random shut downs - causing missed calls, etc.

With the Focus I've had none of these issues. My only complaint is that Turn-by-Turn navigation (voice) isn't included with the device - but hopefully that'll come in a future release. Most important is that it's accurate.. :)
[Focus General] RustyGrom:
Annecdotal, off-the-wall theory but I'm sorta thinking this issue may be power related. I've never noticed my Focus rebooting when it's plugged into the wall. It happens all the time when it's unplugged. When the battery gets somewhat low (like 25% remaining) it seems to do it super often.

The only technical reason I can think of is that the power states change and the phone gets more aggressive with sleep states when it's unplugged and the power is low. There could be a platform-level bug somewhere in there. It may not be a straight-up "bug" but it could be that the tolerances are too low. Maybe the device is cutting off power too soon or dropping the voltage to the card too much and then attempting to read from the card?

Have you guys seen different behaviors when on AC vs when on battery? Am I just imagining things?
[Focus General] hyperzulu:
My phone has been rock solid with the 8gb card, but yesterday I did have a random reboot. Yesterday also happened to be the only day I've ever put the Focus' battery to the 0 bar point. I can't be sure that it was at 0 when it happened though, but I pretty much chalked it up to buggy OS, since it's never happened before and the speed of the device is still fast with the card and tons of data.

Maybe this is not card related? Or the card itself draws power, causing the low power levels to brown out the unit? Dunno...
[Focus General] webdev511:
Yes, SDHC cards do draw power. The larger the card, the more power they draw, so it could very well be the OS throttling power with unintended consequences. Shouldn't they have caught that in testing? Was it even tested? If I had my choice between paying more for more on board memory and the crap shoot that "add your own memory" has become, I'd go for the former, not the latter.
[Focus General] RustyGrom:
Most of the tests are done by automated machines and on AC power. Microsoft didn't want devices to ship with SD card slots. They probably didn't test this much, if at all. Samsung probably just assumed it would be fine and didn't test rigorously either.
[Focus General] tripntx:
Been following WP7 for months, and been lurking on this thread for a couple of weeks. Finally picked up a Focus Friday night from my local AT&T store. Brought it home, installed a spare Kingston 8GB Class 4 mSD in my phone, went to setting-about-and reset phone. Memory was acknowledged, phone worked great. Figured I might as well put even more memory in it, although this 8GB came out of my other Samsung non SmartPh, and had less than 100MB data on it from 2 yrs use. Not into music and videos on my phone.

Purchased a Patriot 16GB Class 4 MSD from Fry's online Friday night, store p/u option, $32 seemed cheap enough for instant upgrade. Picked up Patriot mSD when store opened Saturday. Powered phone off, swapped cards, powered on, went to setting-about-reset, only had 15MB, not GB. Tried this several times, and powered off several times.

Tried 3 button reset several times, but kept getting to mobiledownload screen and would have to remove battery to escape out of it. Man was it a long 50 mile drive back home. Didn't realize releasing all three buttons at same time would put you in mobiledownload screen.

Once hm, I searched and found the answer: hold down volume -, camera, and then power, but release pwr button the moment the ph vibrates while still holding down volume - and camera buttons. Release those buttons a couple of seconds later. Finally was able to format disc, once formatted it showed 22GB memory, with 20GB available. Wonderful, I'll never use up that amount of memory on this phone. Or at least I don't think so.

In the last 24 hrs I have purposely powered ph off several times, even removed the battery a few times and haven't lost anything or experienced any problems. I plan on rebooting every couple of days from this point forward with simple power off and on. Will post again if it starts having problems.

Really enjoying this phone. Been using Samsung Impression for a couple of years, and thought I must have real keyboard, but didn't care for the LG offering and Dell seems to have some problems at the moment. Virtual Keyboard is easy to get used to, and this screen is simply awesome, not to mention how light and slim the Samsung Focus is.
[Focus General] Parellel:
Hi All,

I just joined these forums for this thread. I had purchased the kingston 8GB class 4 card back when it was listed as "safe". I got the card on friday and proceeded to install it in my phone. At first my phone didn't recognize the card at all, so I gave up. An hour later I figured I'd try again, this time I installed the card and noticed that even though it "clicked" in, it still wasn't in all the way.

So I pushed the card further into the slot and the phone picked it up. The card doesn't fit snug into its slot, and I'm almost wondering if some of these "issues" are a result of the card sliding out of it's slot.

When I put my phone in my pocket I put it headphone jack down so maybe I'm not having these issues because when I walk my card is being shifted back into it's slot. For those of you having issues, is it possible that the card is just sliding out of it's slot and the phone is freaking out the next time it tries to access the card?

I hope I've described this well enough (I'm not that great at describing things). If I've been unclear let me know and I'll try to reword it, I just figured I'd share my experience.

Kingston 8GB Class 4 (From amazon.ca) - Working (For the last two and a half days).
[Focus General] gillbell:
I appreciate all of the activity on this thread. Going to pickup the Focus in a week or two and its nice to have people willing to be the trailblazers for some of these Gen. 1 issues.
[Focus General] JohnPalmer:
Follow-Up on SanDisk 32GB Class 2 Card

After experiencing a random reboot 10 days ago, I decided to keep the 32 GB Sandisk card in the Focus. I have noticed in the past few days, the random reboots have increased in frequency and last night the phone powered off twice. At this point, I am considering returning both the card and the Focus back to AT&T. The Samsung Focus is a nice phone but I don't think its ready for primetime. I can't understand why phone manufacturers don't spend some time and money in testing the phones out before releasing them to the general public. The Focus has so much promise yet the expandable memory issue has gone too far without any formal or official response from Samsung (their Q&A section on their website is a joke and chockfull of inaccurate information i.e., the Focus has 16GB of memory, etc.). Microsoft has stated it is currently testing market memory cards but I suspect no card, except maybe a Sandisk 8GB, will render the phone stable. I cannot see Kingston or Sandisk making cards exclusively for Windows Phone. Not many people will adopt to Windows Phone and the demand will be minimal.

I will wait another week before my 30 day return period expires but it looks like at this point I may have to wait until 2011 when Verizon will carry Windows Phone, hopefully models that have more than the bs 8GB stock memory.
[Focus General] Bosus:
I just yanked my 16GB Sandisk Class 2. It started acting up after a week, filled well past 8GB. I posted earlier about it getting stuck in a reboot loop when I plugged it in, which I fixed by rebooting without the SIM or the SD card. I then did a hard reset and tried again with the card, and a few days later, after loading it back up with >10GB music and apps, it started rebooting, etc., again.

I just hard reset without the card to see what happens.
[Focus General] naplesbill:
Well, I still haven't had a single issue with my PNY 16GB card. My friend has been using the previous Centon 8GB in his focus for a couple of weeks as well.

I have almost 12GB of data synced to the device and have not noticed any slowdowns syncing with the Zune software. I think a big problem with Sandisk cards, is that even Sandisk can't stop the fake cards. Kingston has had big problems with fake cards as well.
[Focus General] gillbell:
How long have you been running stable with that PNY?
[Focus General] naplesbill:
It has been over two weeks now.
[Focus General] jgamlieli:
that is exactly the same behavior I experienced with same card . Never a reboot pr loss of data, just random lack of response, especially after loading and switching back and forth with multiple apps. Also the camera app seemed to cause the most slowdowns. I decided to take the card out and live with the internal storage for now. The device is now very responsive with no lags. I am hoping someone will at least come up with a way to reformat the cards so they aee useable again, that is other then using a Nokia phone to do it since I have not been able to locate one at any att store in my area - Los Angeles .
[Focus General] MKohlman:
Power-related?

Yes, Rusty, I've seen the exact same pattern with my Focus and a Sandisk 32GB card, and have posted on this thread about it.

I have yet to see a reboot or lock-up when on A/C Power/Plugged and and Recharging. However when on battery it can and does occur.

- MEK
[Focus General] KoshKosh:
Sandisk Class 4 16gb

After a week, everything is still good. No slowdowns other than marketplace which has a lag (not sure I can attribute it to the mem card)

Happily I have nothing else to report.
[Focus General] denispage:
I'm using Komputerbay 32GB MicroSD SDHC Microsdhc Class 6.

Now it's almost full with pictures, music, video and apps (only 2 gb free on focus) and everything is working fine.

I turn off and turn on the phone without problem.

15gb of music ~20gb of video and photos.

Bought it from amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ZTEEHI/ref=oss_product
[Focus General] FL5:
Apparently your post works wonders, as somehow within the 8 minutes between your post and when I checked, it is now no longer available! o_O

Seriously though, how long have you run it? Days? Week or two? Do you see the speed issues others do when syncing?