exFAT partition for SD Card Patch Storage

I’m familiar enough with Linux that I know what I’m doing with regards to the filesystem resizing, so there’s no worry of me messing things up here, this is more of a curiosity to know if there are any downsides.

I’ve got a 128gb microSD, and originally I was planning on just extending the filesystem using the same process as thetechnobear’s Resize SD patch. However, I’ve realised that it’s a bit silly for this partition to be ext4 when swapping it to exFAT would allow direct reading of the SD card on pretty much any system.

Are there any downsides to this that anyone can think of?
The only downside I can see is that it’s not extendable from within Linux as far as I can tell, but even then being able to read the SD card directly to back up patches before rebuilding the partition would probably negate that downside.

I’m going to give this a shot, I’ll report back anything gamebreaking. If anyone knows of a reason why not to do this though, please let me know

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not really … the sdcard is not very ‘accessible’ on the organelle…
whilst doing doing dev/testing on the organelle, I’ve had to swap the sdcard in/out lots of times - and its all too easy (even being careful) to drop the sdcard into the organelle and have to take it apart to retrieve it.

so yeah didn’t really see any advantages to using exFAT at all for something that was for most users an ‘internal drive’.

for things like backing up, I always use a network connection with something like rsync, patches are generally very small… so it takes ‘seconds’ to backup this way, and is much easier than taking out the sdcard :wink: even with lots of samples, id still do this…

anyway, whilst i do see any advantage,

it will work without doubt, linux wont care - and patches can be read from the usb-drive which uses fat - so, there wont be any ‘case sensitivity’ issues (which is the main difference from the app perspective)

I mean, I’m hardly going to be taking it in and out repeatedly every other day, I’ll use WiFi for the majority of things. But for the sake of convenience for things like backups, being able to just plug it in and read the patch directory directly definitely has it’s advantages.

I get what you mean about dropping it inside though lol, I’ve done that countless times with my Disting. Still, this isn’t something I’d do frequently!

It’s one of those situations where once it’s set up, since there’s no real downside, why not?
If it works the same but also has the ability to be read directly in Windows, then it doesn’t really hurt to have as an option.

Having said that, my preliminary experimentation has been a little bit weird.
First off I deleted and remade the partition with fdisk to extend it to the full size, and then I reformatted it to exfat. I then tweaked the fstab to load the exfat partition instead, and rebooted.

First reboot didn’t work at all, seems like the partition wasn’t created properly. Remaking it seemed to work fine though, and it booted straight in.

I then tried to read it on windows 10, but for whatever reason windows didn’t see it as a mountable partition. It was all very strange. I ended up having to delete and remake and reformat the partition with the windows disk manager, but after doing that it seemed to mount fine on the Organelle while also mounting correctly on Windows.

I put my WiFi config back on as well as the Patches directory, and… Nothing.
The Wifi config all worked fine, my network showed up and I can connect to it fine. It can clearly read the partition, and going in to the terminal definitely shows it mounted correctly. But for whatever reason, it’s not detecting any patches.

I’m actually totally stumped at this, I’ve got no idea why it’s not working right.
My fstab is /dev/mmcblk0p3 /sdcard exfat defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=022 0 0, so there’s no reason why it should have any issues finding the patches. Permissions should be good, file structure should be good, it’s being mounted, and as far as I can tell it’s able to read the Wifi config files as well as write to the log.

Any ideas?

Figured it out - Seems for whatever reason, the Organelle M can’t load patches from an exFAT partitioned device.

Tried a USB drive in both FAT32 and exFAT, while they could both be mounted and read by the OS without issue, whatever it is that populates the patch list doesn’t seem to like exFAT.

That seems like something that’s probably worth looking into generally, since that affects USB devices too.

EDIT: Total success formatting as vfat instead of exfat. It’s actually super easy too, just reformatting to vfat with mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblk0p3 and changing the fstab to vfat instead of using resize2fs.

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Ah yeah there is a bug in the folder listing portion of the Organelle software so when using exFAT things don’t show up.

Sorry you had to go through all that, I saw these messages earlier but didn’t have a chance to reply till now! Thanks for sharing all the details. I agree exFAT should be an option for SD or USB and it is on the list of things to fix for next update.

Haha, not to worry!
Everything is perfect now, so that’s not a problem anymore. It’s my fault anyway for not reading the manual well enough, because it’s perfectly clear in there lol.

I’ve got a nice clear method for doing this now though, so if there’s a future update that requires doing it all over again it’s only a 5 minute job.

Good to see exFAT is on the roadmap though!

I have no insight but this was a good read!

In my experience and the Nintendo Switch community, using exFAT without the need to store large files results in more frequent file system crashes and corruption in case of improper extraction or power failure and is not recommended. I myself came across this several times, now I use FAT32 on all devices, except for ordinary general-purpose flash drives.

That’s really interesting, I was always under the assumption that exFAT was a bit more stable than FAT32. Apparently being nearly 45 years old isn’t an issue, lol.