Rasp Pi 3 - Max SD card size

I run two sdcards on my pi 3.

SAMSUNG EVO+ 32GB UHS-1/HC-1

SANDISK PIXTOR 64GB UHS-1/HC-1

Of the two, I prefer the Samsung which offers better/faster write speeds (20MB/s)  in Raspbian/Debian Jessie.

To use the 64GB sdcard, you have to format it as fat32 (not exfat), I used diskpart to clean the sdcard, then partitioned and formatted 32GB of it as fat32 (the remainder is left unformated) Afterwards, I simply expanded the 32GB file system to 64GB via sudo raspi-config.

(Edited for clarity on how to use 64GB sdcard on pi3)

Hi All,

The issue is one that I haven't seen addressed by manufacturers yet:  The BIOS on most portable devices at least (phones and the Pi for example) are incapable of addressing larger than 32GB.  The same goes for bootable USB drives on computers...  They are only programmed to understand certain formatting types, and they usually will only understand FAT32 at the highest level, which maxes out at 32GB addressing.  Hopefully someday soon manufacturers will incorporate exFAT in their BIOS programming.  And how cool would it be if they could read EXT4?

Anyway, so Rive's solution makes sense once you understand this...  He created a base partition on a larger chip that was under that 32GB limit, formatted it as FAT32 (which the BIOS can interpret), and then had to basically create an extension via a different partition to be able to use the remainder of the space.  Honestly, from having to do similar myself on various computers over the years, I can tell you it is an imperfect and annoying solution.  For these purposes, you will probably ultimately want to just use a 32GB card for the OS to boot from, use for temporary memory, and most common files, and use other media for your main file storage.  (I haven't tried it yet on my Pi3, but I have a 1TB USB stick that I want to play using the Pi3 as a portable media player.)

Hope that helps make sense of things!

Hi All,

The issue is one that I haven't seen addressed by manufacturers yet:  The BIOS on most portable devices at least (phones and the Pi for example) are incapable of addressing larger than 32GB.  The same goes for bootable USB drives on computers...  They are only programmed to understand certain formatting types, and they usually will only understand FAT32 at the highest level, which maxes out at 32GB addressing.  Hopefully someday soon manufacturers will incorporate exFAT in their BIOS programming.  And how cool would it be if they could read EXT4?

Anyway, so Rive's solution makes sense once you understand this...  He created a base partition on a larger chip that was under that 32GB limit, formatted it as FAT32 (which the BIOS can interpret), and then had to basically create an extension via a different partition to be able to use the remainder of the space.  Honestly, from having to do similar myself on various computers over the years, I can tell you it is an imperfect and annoying solution.  For these purposes, you will probably ultimately want to just use a 32GB card for the OS to boot from, use for temporary memory, and most common files, and use other media for your main file storage.  (I haven't tried it yet on my Pi3, but I have a 1TB USB stick that I want to play using the Pi3 as a portable media player.)

Hope that helps make sense of things!

Any updates on the 1TB memory working?