Seattle-Bill
lvl.2
United States
Offline
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With regarding to the missing of SD card formating, the reasons I brought it up are the following:
1. As someone who has nearly 40 years of hi-tech industry experiences and a software engineer working on computers and devices, I alwasy have the habbit to reformat new hard drives or new SD card with the proper file format and sector or allocation unit size, because many years ago I learned that when the computer writes files to HD or SSD it can go faster with a disk or SD that's foramtted with larger sector/allocation sizes.
This is akin to use a spoon to scoop up water and dump it into a container: if you have a larger spoon (sector size/allocation unit), you can scoop up more water (data) each time to fill the container (disk/SSD) faster, and it takes less number of scooping cycles to fill the container, but if you have a smaller spoon, you get less water each time and it takes you a bit more times to do the scooping. The downside is that you may have some wasted spaces on disk if your file is small. But for larger files such as photos and videos, using larger sector size/allocation units has a slight advantage in efficiency and speed. This was true for hard disks, and I am not sure if it still matters in today's SD cards. But the mere fact that exFAT formatting still has this allocation option means it may have some differences (although the difference is speed and time saving is probably negligible.
So when I foramtted the Samsung SSD with the maximum allocation size, as I typcally would do with exFAT formatting, the card became non-readable by the MP4 drone, and this was the reason I thought something could be wrong with the drone. But again, it could be just a bad card from Samsung, and hopefully after I get my replacement this issue will go away.
2. Yes, formatting a SD card is a common knowlesge and most users know what to do, so DJI manual skipped it seems to be normal. However, some of the most reputable brand comsumer electronics prpoduct companies, for example, Canon/Nikon/Sony cameras, or even in the case of my Covetter C8 car manual, they included the info about how the SD card should be formatted, including which file format to use (since many electronic devices won't recognize NTFS which is typically the Windows PC formatting default. I thought that given DJI is a high quality and reputable electronic product brand, especially given their popularity among the drone users, I thought they would also do like what Canon/Sony/Chevrolet/etc. have done, to include this info in the user manual. When I first got the drone and the new SD card, I open the M4P manual and entered SD card as my first search query in the manual, because I wanted to know what DJI recommnds so that I can formatted it properly like what I did with the SD cards in my camera or in my C8 sports car, and to my suroprise, it's not there in DJI's manual. I am pretty sure that if I formatted it with NTFS, it won't work at all, so missing this in the manual is a hole to me.
3. Also, the factor that after you format the SD card on the drone and on the RC2, the file folders are actually different: the SD card formatted on the drone just has two folders: DCIM and MISC, and the photos are stores in the DCIM folder, whereas on the card formatted on the RC2, it actally has a full blown Android OS folder structure, and you'd need to drill down to find DCIM folder for the stored photos. I think for the mere fact that these folder structures are different, DJI manual should mentioned this, so new users will know and won't get confused.
Yes, I understand that this is a small detail and it's not a big deal, but to me, it demenstrated the product manual quality and completness of the product company. In this regard, DJI has something to learn from Canon/Sony/Chevrolet, which is you don't assume your users knows everything, and you provide as much detail to make it as complete as possible in your user manuals.
OK, stepping down from my soapbox ... :-)
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