I'm troubleshooting a few issues with a colleagues system while they're not on location and am curious if SD cards are meant to be hot-swappable. When I retrieve a card to check data and swap in another one, I have to give the system a hard reboot or else I have issues getting it to write to the new card properly. I discovered that if I don't give a reboot, when I go back the next time, all I will have on the card is the most recent 8,9696 records (about 75 minutes at this sample rate) in a 2,804 KB file. The number of records and file size are always exactly the same. Another colleague guessed that this was a buffer being written to the card when I hit the eject button. The reboot isn't particularly burdensome, but I was interested in finding out if it's necessary or something that can be fixed in his program.
Question answered by Campbell Sci. Support in an email:
"Yes, you should be able to swap a SD card without rebooting the logger. [...]"
You shouldn't need to reboot the logger, I've several CR1000x using SD cards I regularly swap with freshly formatted cards
I did experienced a similiar situation last year with a CR1000 & compact flash. Turned out I was inadvertently formatting the cards to FAT instead of FAT32 on my PC. I was recording high frequency data, as I recall the SD card acted like a super small ring memory, may have been around 2 kb in fact. It stored my high frequency data as a few hundred files endlessly looping through and over writing the previous data. Have you tried having the CR1000x format the card directly? This should format the card correcly as FAT32.
We are using MicroSD cards with CR6 and CR1000x. we use TFOption 64 in TableFile instruction.
TableFile ("CRD:FILENAME",64,-1,0,30,Min,0,0)
In some stations we record a file every 30 min (as you can see in the example above) and in others every 24 hours. We never had any problem with hot-swapping the card, as long as the eject button is pressed before removing the card.