Hi there, im new here, my order of the zynthian v5.1 will arrive in a few days.
Now i have a question about the sd-card.
In the wiki.zynthian its says on the one site i should avoid a 32gb sdcard, but on the other it says (32-64) are fine.
I have a few 32gb sd card lying. should i start with them?
32g is fine.
Thx
I’d think it’s fine if you not plan to use extensive sample/collection data.
I have a majority of a 128GB card occupued.
Hi and welcome!
As far as SD card sizes go, I think that a rule of thumb could be as follows:
Leave about 16 Gb for system installation and safe handling of the temporary r/w paging;
Consider a minimum of further 16 Gb for a basic provision of soundfont libraries, and for data and ROM requirements of the sound engines, depending on chosen processors;
Allow for another 32 GB, or more, if you plan to install a wide palette of large soundfonts, or think about using Zynthian as a multichannel live recorder or heavy audio launcher.
[Disclaimer: there have been, there are and there will certainly be forum members who can testify that they run their Zynths perfectly with small SDs. That obviously depends on the usage scenario and the user’s technical prowess].
All considered, and whenever there is a small difference in price between 32 and 64 (which isn’t always the case), I would recommend if possible to choose a (SanDisk) 64 Gb uSD.
Cheers
We don’t use paging in zynthian. We have in the past created a minimal image without soundfonts that fits on a 16GB card. (I would quite like for that to be the default now that we have a package system for downloading the soundfonts we want. This would speed up image download and flashing.) The minimum size for the current vangelis beta is 32GB. This is fine for most users. You only need larger if you intend to store large soundfont libraries, sample packs, recordings, etc. but you can also do most of this with external storage which may suit some users better. I tend to buy 64GB because they are currently the sweet spot for value but have previously used 32GB just fine. I have experienced and read about issues with 128GB, but that could have been due to faulty, fake or early tech cards when 128GB was significantly more expensive.
Ive used 32G as a default for all zynthians…plenty of space and ive had issues possibly long gone with 64s but that was sometime ago
Thanks for all the replies, i think i will go for a 64 gb then. 
64GB is the right call, but the variable that bites people more often than capacity is which card you buy. Cheap high-capacity cards often use aggressive wear-levelling firmware that behaves badly under the many-small-writes pattern an embedded Linux system produces, and the failure mode isn’t a dead card, it’s random corruption that looks like a software bug. Sticking to an endurance-rated card (the ones marketed for dashcams) costs a few euros more and removes a whole class of mystery.
Practical habit that’s saved me time: once you have your unit configured the way you like it, take a full image of the working card and keep it somewhere. Restoring a known-good image takes minutes and tells you instantly whether a new problem is software or hardware. Two 64GB cards, one as a rolling backup, is cheaper than an evening of debugging.
Also worth knowing you can keep those 32GB cards useful as test/spare cards for trying a new release, without touching your main setup. That’s arguably the better use for them than making them the daily card.
Yes that is true. Usually i use the canvas go! plus from kingston. But i read somewhere that some people had issues with the kingston sd cards. I never had issues with them before.
And as you mention its a good idea to use always two.
Maybe there are also fake sd cards out there
We try to avoid excessive writes to the SD. This was an early design decision. We may need to revisit to ensure this is still optimal.
In my experience, recent 32GB SD cards tend to be more problematic than 64GB ones.
I stopped buying 32GB SD cards because of this.
Regards,