What is the Full Capacity of my SD Card?
What is the full capacity of my SD card?
When Micro SD cards have NOOBS preloaded on the card the storage capacity of the card will appear much smaller then the actual capacity of the card.
The reason for this is due to partitions that are placed on the card when the NOOBS software is flashed onto the card.
When the NOOBS software is loaded onto a SD card, it creates partitions that are only visible by the linux operating system, therefore the card will appear to be 1GB (or even less sometimes) on a standard windows system.
SD Card Partitioning means, it splits the SD card in compartments and you see on the computer only 1 partition.
Even when formatted via PC the partitions will stay in place unless it is formatted via the SD Formatter program. The SD Formatter program will remove the partitions as well.
The best way to check the capacity of the card (while the card has NOOBS and the PI is running) is to go the raspian terminal and enter:
df -Bm
This will show the actual storage capacity of the card.
If you would like to format the card to see what is the full capacity of my SD card is on a Windows computer please follow the steps below:
1. Download the SDFORMATTER for windows program:(link below)
The SD Memory Card Formatter formats SD Memory Card, SDHC Memory Card and SDXC Memory Card (respectively SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards) complying with the SD File System Specification created by the SD Association (SDA).
2. Insert SD card and open program
3. Select Full Erase and in the options make sure that the “format size” option is set to “on” .
After Running this erase , you should see the full capacity of the card on windows as well.
If after running the check in the Raspbian terminal window or running a full erase with partition format via SDFORMATTER your card still does not show the capacity as stated on the card please contact us and we will look into the issue and send replacements etc. as soon as possible.
If you would like to read more about different types of SD cards and capacities click here
