Hi,
Reading through the guide to PC/CF cards for CS data loggers (http://www.campbellsci.com/documents/technical-papers/pc_cf_cards.pdf)what limits the CF card size to 2Gb? If a larger card were used, say 4Gb, would this last twice as long?
Andy
No currently we only support 2GB cards. You could use a 4GB card and make a primary partition of 2GB which the logger can use, but you won't be able to store more than 2GB.
Supporting larger cards is currently under review but the change is not straightforward as much of the firmware cannot deal with files bigger than 2GB, which comes from the underlying FAT file system. We have to devise a way of splitting up the data into files to deal with this limit.
I am not sure of the timescales for adding the new support - watch this space!
Thanks for the reply.
One other quick question - At 10Hz, using a KH20, CSAT3 and LI7500 how many days of EC data would you expect to collect on a 2GB card?
For basic data at 10 Hz our old manual says a 1GB card would hold about 30 days of raw data.
I've never done a CF card partition before -- could you provide some guidance?
You mentioned a "primary" partition. Does "primary" mean that this partition will be used by default? I'm asking because I'm curious how to tell the CR1000/NL115 which partition to use.
Finally, assuming we're not successful in partitioning the card, what happens if we use a 4GB card without a 2GB partition?
If you go to www.campbellsci.com/downloads and get the latest operating system for your logger and load it you will find the logger will now support cards larger than 2 GB without doing any partitioning.
There is one important limitation you need to understand though and that is a standard datatable cannot be larger than 2GB though. This means you can only utilise the larger capacity if you have multiple data tables or you use the Tablefile instruction to write lots of smaller files to the card.
To answer your subsequent post that seems to have been lost in an upgrade to the website, re trying to use a 4GB card in a logger with an old OS: I have not tried this myself but I believe the logger will just refuse to use the card as it does not recognise the format.
* Last updated by: aps on 1/30/2012 @ 2:05 AM *