SD Card Full

[Pugsy]

Your insurance company doesn't care what your settings are. They just want you to use the machine at least the minimum number of hours.
The hours of use along with summary AHI numbers is stored on the machine and will be put onto any SD card you insert in the machine.
Also check with your insurance company...if you have been using the machine since May the compliance period may have already passed and they no longer even care about hours of use.
Check with your insurance directly though...don't rely on what the DME says. They can't possibly know all the different compliance policies for all the different insurance plans out there.

If the DME or doctor squawks because you changed things...at worst you get a verbal tongue lashing. They can't take the machine away.
Only the insurance can get that done by denying payment (assuming payment is still being made but you might own it outright by now).

If you can't get that SD card cleaned up for whatever reason...just set it aside and go get a new one and start using it.
The summary usage stuff is retained on the machine's internal memory for at least a year and will go right back on the new card.
You will lose some really old detailed graphs but that is about it. Those are already in SleepyHead and aren't of much critical use by now anyway.
Current use...you lose only past flow rate charts and again those are in SH already.

Anything the DME might want or need or your insurance company.....is stored on the machine and will be written directly to a new blank SD card.

[Pugsy]

The reason I ask about the P folders is that the only way the machine itself could be filling up the card is with a little bug I have seen on a few Respironics machines where it writes an inordinate number of sessions per night which fill up the P folders quickly and thus there will be an inordinate number of P folders...which could fill up a SD card too quickly. You may or may not have that little bug in your machine.

[stevez]

Thanks again Pugsy! You're the best!

[SnoringInOregon]

I have stumbled upon a (perhaps different) explanation for why the dreamstation is reporting "SD Card Full". It's quite possible that the original poster committed the unpardonable sin of changing the time on his machine.

My DreamStation just started saying the same thing, even though the SD card is not full at all.

I just set my dreamstation clock back by one hour. My machine time was off by an hour after the recent change from DST. Every Windows, Unix, and macOS computer does this automatically. But the twits at Respironics somehow managed to screw it up. And they screwed it up even though (at least on my dreamstation) they obviously run something like NTP over the wireless modem to keep the correct time. (I know that because my time remained correct to the nearest second until the recent DST change).

Immediately after I changed time I got the SD card full message. And I mean immediately. As in just as I pressed in the dial to make the time change.

So not only are the pinheads at Respironics incapable of changing the time automatically, they somehow check the time information previously written to the SD card and throw a hissy fit if they detect time going backwards.

I save the contents of my SD card each night. Three files were changed. LAST (dot) TXT, LOG (dot) SEQ, and PROP (dot) TXT. I tried restoring the contents and the timestamps on those files from the previous day. But their software check is more encompassing than that. I still get the "SD Card Full" message.

I will try to reformat my SD card. Hopefully that will fix the issue.

[davidbak]

Here is the solution to "SD Card Full" on Dreamstation:

I solved my "SD Card Full" problem by reformatting my new card with a smaller partition.

The issue is that there are several "formats" for the file system on the card. Over there years there has been FAT16, FAT32, and now exFAT. Each change has been driven by the fact that storage devices - hard disks, SSDs, and SD cards - get larger and larger capacities.

The last such change was the move to exFAT when removable devices - like USB sticks and SD cards - got over 32GB capacity.

And apparently the Dreamstation firmware does not understand exFAT!

32GB and larger cards come out of the box formatted exFAT. And Windows will format a card with exFAT automatically if it is 32GB or larger.

So you have two solutions:

1. Simply buy a card that is smaller than 32GB! 16GB is fine.
2. Reformat/repartition your card so that it has only a 16GB partition on it.

I did number 2 above with my brand new 32GB card that did not work ("SD Card full") in my Dreamstation. Worked fine with a 16GB partition formatted FAT32.

(Procedures for reformatting/repartitioning your card, using Windows, can be found on the net. If you're not familiar with how to do such things, I suggest simply buying a new card.)

(I actually didn't discover this until I sent in the card to my provider to get my annual supply prescription renewal. I was pretty upset when it couldn't be read until she assured me the data is still in the machine and as soon as I put an SD card in properly it would get written. I knew I hadn't inserted it improperly a year earlier - so after that it was pretty clear to me (I'm a software engineer) what the problem was likely to be and I verified the fix for it easily. I can (sort of) understand why Philips Respironics did it this way: the exFAT format for larger cards is protected by Microsoft with patents and licenses cost money. But what I can not understand is why Philips doesn't document this restriction anywhere you can find it! Lame!)