No MITM from me.<p>You've got some good advice from professionals.<p>My experience as a user may be something to consider.<p>There can be a big difference in performance between different kinds of SD cards, and especially the way they are formatted.<p>For one thing there is the SD Association, and their ever-evolving specs as well as their own proprietary (!, from Tuxera apparently since 2017) ever-evolving formatting tool available for download free on their website.<p><a href="https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/faq/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/faq/</a><p>Lots of users are not aware of this.<p>Still uses "regular" FAT32 for sizes from 2GB to 32GB, and exFAT from 32GB upward.<p>This can be good for things from manufacturers that might be expected to conform to the specification as it was at the time, whether intentional or not.<p>Sometimes it is worthwhile to compare the factory card layout/format (and back it up for possible reinstatement) against that obtained after using various alternative formatting tools. Many times a subsequent tool will mimic the layout of the previous format unless the medium is zeroed or cleaned before re-partitioning & re-formatting.<p>Also, for some hardware having limited software capabilities like cameras, it can be best to partition, format, and error-check using a full PC in a repeatable way before or after storing material on the SD card. OTOH, sometimes the only way a camera will access a card is if it is formatted on-board using it's own simplified algorithm, after which it may or may not be able to be read or written by all PCs. You should be able to select your partitioning tools and formatting tools independently from each other for each type hardware, filesystem and application. Not always true in practice.<p>In some of these cases one strategy that sometimes seems best (and could be considered along the Windows mainstream) is to use recent Windows to Clean & partition and format the drive. Especially for FAT32 or NTFS use. A built-in card reader on something like a laptop can be ideal. Or it can be garbage. For even more reliability with FAT32, you might go as far as booting to the DOS from W98SE to reformat /quick which in DOS also allows you to fully label the volume. This may not actually be "quick" if you don't have a rapidly-bootable DOS USB stick handy (or if your floppy has too many cobwebs), but generally you get the full 20th century FAT32 shebang like nothing ever since, with backup boot sector to boot, and with /quick, it doesn't start from scratch. The DOS Quick format (if it can) will be overlaid on the existing 21st century FAT32 layout that Windows 11 (or some other 21st century formatter) thinks is optimized for the media these days. So FAT32 pre-formatted on NT6 (or something), rather than having DOS try to figure it out on virgin solid-state media. Then finish it off by reformatting Quickly in DOS. That's why they call it FAT32 ;)<p>For Windows users other than employing exFAT for larger drives, it can also be good to try putting 2 or more partitions on an SD card, the first a 32GB FAT32, followed by an NTFS volume(s) taking up the remainder of the drive. Or even a number of 32GB volumes, FAT32 or otherwise. Now that Windows 10/11 has been able to access more than just the first partition on a removable drive.<p>Also, one investigative tool you may find interesting is called flashbench. It's a little bit arcane and did what it was supposed to do years ago, hasn't been updated since.