I am writing this because it doesn’t exist in the depths of Google (yet!).

In February 2009 I purchased a Dell Mini 9. I wanted more space to store my personal files such that I could use a majority of the Mini’s 16GB SSD for applications. I primarily wanted some type of media that I could put my iTunes music on and easily hot-swap it to and from my XPS M1530. The answer was taking advantage of the SD card slot. So, I did some research and learned that the Mini 9 can support all SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) media cards up to 32GB. I then ran a quick search and figured out that my XPS M1530 could support SDHC cards (the text article I read gave reference to an 8GB SDHC card). So, I found the best deal and bought myself a 16GB Class 4 SDHC card from Fry’s Electronics. I was thrilled… Until I tried to get the XPS to recognize it. My laptop said the card needed to be formatted, but that didn’t work. After much time fiddling with different transfer methods onto the card from my XPS, I finally contacted Dell Text Support (about March 2009). The support individual could not get a transfer to work and subsequently gave me a link to go download new drivers – those didn’t help.

So where does this go?… I gave up. It’s really crazy, but what I ended up having to painstakingly do is plug my external hard drive into my XPS M1530, copy all the music I wanted on my Mini 9 into a new folder on the external HDD, then plug the HDD into my Mini 9, and then finally copy the folder from the HDD to the 16GB SDHC card which was successfully recognized in only the Mini 9. It became a hassle I didn’t want to deal with. Anyway, it turned out that I wouldn’t need my Mini 9 to listen to music when I had an iPhone 3G in my pocket anyway. I’m really frustrated that there’s no support for over 8GB SDHC cards on Dell XPS M1530′s. I hope this posting finds its way to the surface on some Google searches regarding my same problem. It doesn’t seem anyone else on forums has raised such a red flag.