Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a
proprietary
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logical sectors (smaller than 7.8 GB): FAT32
File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by c ...
with partition type Partition type#PID 0Bh, 0Bh and EBPB 7.1
** Capacity of at least 16,450,560 logical sectors (larger than 7.8 GB): FAT32
File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by c ...
with partition type Partition type#PID 0Ch, 0Ch and EBPB 7.1
* For SDXC cards: exFAT
exFAT (Extensible File Allocation Table) is a file system introduced by Microsoft in 2006 and optimized for flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards. exFAT was proprietary until 28 August 2019, when Microsoft published its specificati ...
with partition type Partition type#PID 07h, 07h
Most consumer products that take an SD card expect that it is partitioned and formatted in this way. Universal support for FAT12, FAT16, FAT16B, and FAT32 allows the use of SDSC and SDHC cards on most host computers with a compatible SD reader, to present the user with the familiar method of named files in a hierarchical directory tree.
On such SD cards, standard utility programs such as Mac OS X's "" or Windows' SCANDISK can be used to repair a corrupted filing system and sometimes recover deleted files. Defragmentation tools for FAT file systems may be used on such cards. The resulting consolidation of files may provide a marginal improvement in the time required to read or write the file,