PRS-950 expanding memory on the 950

[sovre]

Has anyone expanded the memory on their 950? I'm running out of space on mine, mainly due to a number of large pdf files that won't play nice and covert to epub. I'd like to expand it to have the largest amount of memory possible, and am interested in any feedback/recommendations those who have already done so may have.

Does the speed of the SD card matter? Will there be any noticeable difference between a class 4 and class 10 SD card on an eReader?

[SeaBookGuy]

FYI, the other slot is for proprietary Sony memory "sticks", not a second SD slot.

Then again, I keep only a 1 GB card in my 650 for audio files.

[sovre]

Ah ok, yes I'd never looked into this, but I can see now that each slot is of a different size. Does that mean the reader is theoretically expandable to 64GB? You can get a 32GB SD card for the SD slot and also a 32 GB Sony Memory stick? The manual is not really clear on this. It says a 32 GB SD card has been tested to work, and also that 32 GB SD duo has been tested to work on the reader, but doesn't say whether both cards can be used at once.

[sovre]

I am now experimenting with an old 1 GB SD card I had lying around, just to try and get a sense of how the Reader works with an external card.

I copied some ebooks to the SD card using Calibre and noticed that to get my Sony to recognize them, I needed to restart the reader.

I then noticed if I plugged the reader in again and disconnected it, it no longer saw even the books it had recognized before unless I restarted the reader again.

Is it necessary to restart the reader every time new books are added to a SD card, to get the content of the SD card recognized, or is there another easier way?

[SeaBookGuy]

Are you adding to the card as a stand alone destination, or with it in the reader's SD slot?

[sovre]

The card is in the SD slot. And I can see the ebook files are on there on the SD card. They show up in calibre, and also in Windows explorer. It's just the Reader that doesn't seem to be able to see them, until I do a restart, at which point they suddenly appear in my lists with a little boxed "SD" in the column.

[sovre]

Think I may have found the problem. It looks like it may have been related to a PRS+ setting.

Under browse folders in PRS+ settings I noticed "Use mount with SD/MB" was enabled. I disabled that, and enabled "SD/MS card scan" and now books on the SD card are showing up without a problem.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Class 4 should be fine. I don't think you'll notice the speed difference in this case. My 950 has reached its limit on the main memory, and I am probably going to use an SD card soon too. I used to keep my books on a combination of main memory and SD on my older model 505. I didn't have to restart every time I transferred new books to see them.

Here is an old thread with a similar question regarding acceptable types of memory card:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=106978

[delphin]

In theory, I believe that both slots can use 32 Gig cards at the same time, but some large SD cards have cluster/sector size limits which may keep them from formating correctly.

I have run into an 8Gig card that would not work in my PRS-650 until I reformatted it. Some larger 16 and 32 Gig cards may not work at all or may format to 1/2 or 1/4 size when formatted in a way that is compatible with the Sony.

This incompatibility can happen because some SD cards use low cost flash memory which limits the card to allocating storage in very large chunks, but many USB devices will not recognize storage sectors above a certain size.

I have found that this is more of an issue above 8 Gigs.

On a practical basis, anything above 4 to 8 Gigs is not going to work very well unless you are mostly using that extra space for large audio book files, because if you are instead trying to load several thousand smaller e-book titles, THINGS WILL BECOME VERY VERY SLOOOOOW. The slowdown is mainly for loading new books (which can take several minutes to re-index) and when exiting a book title back to the home screen.

I have a couple of gigabytes of book currently on my reader and that works fine with only minor delays using the standard Sony firmware, but anything more than that and things start to become pretty unwieldy.

You can get around most of these issues by hacking the Sony's software and using PRS+ to disable automatic scanning and indexing for the SD card, and then doing your navigating using folders, but there are trade-offs (you can't search book titles that haven't been indexed from your home screen thumbnail browser for example).