Garmin Nuvi 3597 Micro SD Card Formatting

See http://www.poi-factory.com/node/40730

I've added SD cards to three different Garmins (none of them the 3597, although that part shouldn't matter) and I didn't have to do anything. I added the cards, did the map updates and everything worked. BTW,the only thing that went onto the cards were the maps - everything else went onto the units.

Phil

What do you expect to put on the memory card that has twice the amount of user space than the unit itself? You can't put music or audio book on it and there is more than enough room for maps for may years to come in the unit itself. Even POI files don't take up gigabytes of space.

To be honest with you, I really didn't even give that much thought. At $6.99, I just bought the card. In retrospect, an 8 GB would have been $2.00 less and a 4 GB $3.00 less!

http://www.microcenter.com/product/304662/16GB_Micro_Secure_Digital_High_Capacity_(Micro_SDHC)_Flash_Media_Card

http://www.microcenter.com/product/289507/8GB_Class_4_Micro_Secure_Digital_High_Capacity_(Micro_SDHC)_Flash_Media_Card

http://www.microcenter.com/product/289505/4GB_Class_4_Micro_Secure_Digital_High_Capacity_(Micro_SDHC)_Flash_Media_Card

But you can put a full backup of your Nuvi on it and in my case I actually store the map files there as well which leaves the Nuvi's internal storage with over 3GB of free space. Having a backup always with you and not on a backup drive a few hundred miles from your present location should give some people piece of mind.

My backup is on the laptop hard drive (which you need anyway in order to do the reinstall) and on my separate backup drive. But I still ask, why do you need all that free space on the unit itself? You can't really do anything with it.

Just plug it in and you're good.

When I got my 3597 I was delighted to see how much free internal storage it had, especially when I offloaded the unused language files, etc. It was a familiar feeling that I had in the past when I explored my then new nuvi 750, but in time the mapset no longer would fit in the internal storage. It's hard to image that map files will grow to exceed the capacity of the 3597, but we've been proven wrong in such matters repeatedly in the past. I like the idea suggested about storing a backup on the SD card. Even if you had to borrow a friend's laptop and download an app from Garmin, you would have a way to recover your Garmin if needed.

If you put a full backup on the SD card, your nuvi will show up twice in Garmin software such as Garmin Express, POI Loader, etc. (once for the internal storage and again for the SD card). It is not always easy to tell which instance is correct for applying an update.

You can eliminate this situation by renaming the file \Garmin\GarminDevice.xml on the SD card to something like GarminDevice.sav

Some people use Topo Maps and storing them on an SD card may be handy, If you don't plan on using them just eject the SD card.