As you may be aware, most Palm devices that do not carry a "Treo" or "Centro" brand cannot read or write to the new SDHC cards. This leaves everyone owning such devices behind in terms of storage and costs. SD cards top out at 2GB, while SDHC cards are available at 32GB sizes already, and 16GB cards can be obtained for less than $80 USD.

Palm Inc has repeatedly refused to write an SDHC driver for their handhelds. This has long been regarded as a lost cause by most Palm owners. Luckily Palm Inc are not the only ones in power to help. PalmPowerups to the rescue! We've been hard at work creating an SDHC driver for your devices. It is very difficult and has been one of the most complex projects we've ever undertaken here. It is made harder yet since each individual device needs to be uniquely supported and programmed for.

Today we're glad to announce that for for a small set of devices the driver has entered release cycle.

There are many benefits from this driver even if you do not have an SDHC card yet. For example with this driver the card access speed will grow very noticeably, and the card access will not shut off at low battery levels. And of course, now you have support for SDHC cards.

There are caveats of course. First, to use cards whose size is 4GB or over, your device needs to support the FAT32 filesystem. Only Palm LifeDrive and Palm TX ship with it included. All other devices will need to install a FAT32 driver. There is only one option for where to get one - Palm Inc. We here at PalmPowerups are currently investigating writing our own due to reasons mentioned later in this document. For now you may download our wrapper and installer for Palm's FAT32 driver here: [LINK]. All you need to do is install it to RAM and reset. Your device will now support FAT32. Please note that Palm's FAT32 driver is VERY inefficient and slow when mounting cards. Thus on slower devices it can take up to 30 seconds to recognize an inserted 32GB card. This delay goes down for smaller cards, and when we release out own FAT32 driver, it will go away. Also this delay is not present on LifeDrive and TX devices. Another caveat, which is well known to our customers who purchase PowerDrive, is that PalmOS cannot display card sizes over 4GB or free space over 4GB. This does not mean it cannot use them, just that the display of card size and free space will be wrong. You WILL be able to use the WHOLE card size! This is usually just a cosmetic error, and will usually not cause errors or problems. A workaround for this is available in form of the free "CardSize" application available in the "Experimental" section of this site's "Download" page. Also the current driver does not support SDIO, so if you use the WiFi card, you will need to delete the driver and soft reset to use it. SDIO support may be forthcoming.

Current version supports the following devices:

• Palm TX
• LifeDrive
• Tungsten T5
• Tungsten E2
• Zire 72
• Zire 31
• Tungsten C

The process to get a trial version is simple. First you need to register a username on this site. Then you need to download the trial version PRC file. To do this, click the "download" link under the PowerSDHC icon on the front page. Now run it. It will give you your device ID, which will be something like 2134CD6E. Write this down. Your device will now reset; this is normal. Now click on the <GET A TRIAL KEY> link on the top of this article, and fill in the required data. Please be very careful to fill it in correctly. when you do this, you will be given a link to download a keyfile. Download it and save it to a safe location, you will not be able to re-download it. You now need ot install it to RAM of your device. Do so, and run PowerSDHC again. It will blink and return to the launcher screen. The SDHC driver is now active. Your device will get your attention and tell you about the trial expiration and limitations. You will have unrestricted access for 8-9 days, after which the driver will become read-only and speed-limited to a very low speed of 50 KB/s. (Please note that at this speed PalmOS will take up to a half a minute to recognize an inserted card. Do not worry, it is not hung.) At this point you may delete it and soft reset to remove it, or purchase it to get a new key file, that will not expire. To do so, click 'buy" under the PowerSDHC icon on the front page and follow the usual PalmPowerups purchasing process.

Common user mistake is to complain that SDHC card is slower than SD card and refer to VFSmark benchmarks. Let me first of all say that VFSmark is useless for measuring card speed. It measures the speed of the filesystem library on your Palm, and Palm Inc's FAT32 library (used for SDHC) is very slow while their FAT16 library(used for SD) is fast. This is, however, correctable. Format your SDHC card on a PC using cluster size of 32K and it will become much faster. If you want to measure raw card speed, use a PalmPowerups application CardSpeed, which avoid the filesystem and talks to the card driver directly.