Question SD Memory Card Formatter for SD-SDHC-SDXC vs other utilities?

[Super Spartan]

sdcard.org has this utility for formatting SD Cards. How is that different than just right clicking on it and choosing format in Windows?

Would I even need this if I have a 3rd party utility for disk management such as EaseUS Partition Master or does this utility format SD cards in a different way?

 

[Quintessa]

How is that different than just right clicking on it and choosing format in Windows?

The SD Association's formatter aligns partitions and block sizes according to the official SD spec. Windows "Format" often leaves alignment off, doesn't always reset hidden areas, and can create quirks with cameras or devices that expect the card to be laid out exactly per spec.

Would I even need this if I have a 3rd party utility for disk management such as EaseUS Partition Master or does this utility format SD cards in a different way?

EaseUS or Windows will work fine for generic storage, but if you're using the card in cameras, dashcams, or embedded devices, the SD Formatter is safer. It also restores "factory fresh' layout, something partition managers don't guarantee.

 

[00Logic]

What Quintessa said +:

The SD Association formatter using the long format option (whateverTF it's called) does a kind of Secure Erase or TRIM of the drive.
That makes writing to the drive much faster than anything SD or USB formatted by other means.
A std USB 2 drive of mine that writes at ~1MB/s when formatted with Windows format does around 6MB/s after a SD Association long format.

NB: that the speed only lasts until the drive is filled once.
Delete some files and try and write more than the 8GB my drive is and they are back to 1MB/s, necessitating another 'Long Format'


The SD Association formatter also has an uncanny ability to fix SD cards and USB flash drives that have an issue of some sort.
One eg:
Bad 'Sectors' are marked as such, leaving the rest of the card/drive usable when it's done.


If you want to further speed up USB attached storage see Uwe Sieber's:
USB-WriteCache V0.2
MaximumTransferLength
at the bottem of this page.
Uwe is the guy who wrote USB drivers for DOS or Win95 IIRC; not some yob.

For any drive (including fixed drives) that aren't using the NTFS file system; NB the writeup for USB-WriteCache:

Windows only pretends to enable write caching for any FS that is not NTFS..!
Probably to make NTFS look 'shinier' than it actually is.
I found exFAT (with aligned 4K cluster size) with the WriteCacheEnableOverride registry mod to be faster than NTFS.