Just be super careful with buying them online. There are shifty sellers that sell fake cards. Not only do they have a misleading overwhelmingly large size for a ridiculously cheap price. They even have modified headers to trick your computer to reporting it is the same inflated size.
Think a dodgy merchant selling you a bottle that can be filled indefinitely, but instead receiving a bottle with a hole in it.
It’s funny. As a complete side commentary, not to confuse you with anything here, In the raspberry pi community, they actually sell SD cards for beginners that have Linux pre installed with a configuration program called NOOBS. It lets you choose how you want things set up, and installs things accordingly. Ahh that would be kinda awesome to have on Gameshell one day.
@gameshell1 definitely consider getting a new card. For a few reasons!
- Having more space to load up more content is always fun. I prefer to use 32GB. It’s bigger, but not so big that backing off up takes up too much space. I used to get the Sandisk 128GB ultra cards. Genuine ones. I had problems with having them essentially crash, having them become write locked. This only happenned with larger capacity cards. Sandisk were no doubt aware, and promptly replaced them under warranty for free. No questions asked.
- Having a separate card to muck about with, without fear of ruining your installation is great. Compiling code can take hours. Even days! Sometimes you just want to keep a day to day card just for relaxing and knowing it will work.
- If you get a new card with the adaptor, you can be sure it will work, especially with the same brand card if came with. You can get some dodgy fit problems if you try and buy an adaptor on its own. Plus in reality they’re probably worth as much as a cotton bud. If you pay more than a dollar, you’re getting ripped off.
- An SD card actually has a limited finite number of read and writes till it can no longer be used. Writing an OS again and again uses a lot of those lives up. As a wear and tear item, it’s good to have a card you can just test things without caring. Heck. I even have a spare gameshell just to have plugged in for extensive compiling sessions and file transfers. The heat generated having it on is not great for the battery, and screen.
- Besides the official OS 0.5, sometimes you come across users who have made a customised OS. These are great fun, however since they’re not officially supported, you may run into some compatibility problems, and sometimes people won’t be able to help you, due to directory structures being different to what is expected. Here’s an example: