Touch Is it worth to buy a Micro SD?

[vidarr]

Hey all! I've bought the Kobo Touch a few days ago and I'm loving it, so far with 100 books, having read some of them, the device is working great.

Now, something I noticed is that the search function gets annoyingly slow depending on how many books there are in the machine. So, is it worth it to buy a SD for the Kobo? If I put like 300 books, will the search function become even slower than what it already is? If the answer is yes, whats the ideal size of the SD?

They say you can put 30k books on it with 32GB SD but if the search gets slower and slower...

And btw, what is the ideal number of books one could have without having the apparel being painfully slow?

Thanks a lot!

[frankenhooker]

I may be completely wrong about this, but wouldn't the battery go down quicker the more books you have on your device ? I would of thought that the more books you have the more power it takes on boot up to index the files. As I said I may be completely wrong, it wouldn't be the first time.

I have roughly 100 books on my (internal) SD Card and searching is pretty quick, certainly not any slower than I'd expect. I'd of thought the more books you have the slower any search would take, it may even be slower if they're on a different SD Card.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by vidarr

Hey all! I've bought the Kobo Touch a few days ago and I'm loving it, so far with 100 books, having read some of them, the device is working great.

Now, something I noticed is that the search function gets annoyingly slow depending on how many books there are in the machine. So, is it worth it to buy a SD for the Kobo? If I put like 300 books, will the search function become even slower than what it already is? If the answer is yes, whats the ideal size of the SD?

They say you can put 30k books on it with 32GB SD but if the search gets slower and slower...

And btw, what is the ideal number of books one could have without having the apparel being painfully slow?

Thanks a lot!

I don't notice that much slowness with 2000 books on a uSD card compared to having 100 books in the main storage. I'm using a 16GB Sandisk card which was selected for having the best 4K block read/write speed of my collection of uSD cards.

The newer firmware does not store images for every epub which was an issue on the earlier firmware where the internal storage could fill up long before your SD card did. Now, a directory called koboExtStorage will be created on the uSD card to store dictionaries, images and kepubs when needed.

After finding that I was running out of storage on my older Kobos, I started keeping all my sideloaded books on the external card. This also makes it much easier if my Kobo ever gets damaged to simply swap the card into a new unit. It's also handy when I am playing with new firmware since I don't need to copy all the books back to the internal storage after a factory reset. Or when I purchased a Glo and moved the card from the Touch to the Glo before giving the Touch to my daughter.

I did find a small effect on the battery life using the uSD card but I haven't seen any effects on battery life due to the number of books on the card. I have heard of mal-formed books causing issues but my habit of running most epubs through Sigil to check the epub have allowed me to avoid those issues.

[Rant warning -- Next paragraph can be skipped]

One rather surprising (to me) issue is the number of times that I have purchased an epub and found the creators of the epub have simply used an automated tool to convert another format to epub and then not done their due diligence in cleaning up the code. Rather odd since there are tools that will let you check an epub for standards compliance. EpubCheck is likely the best of the available tools while the Flight Crew epub validator used by Sigil is not that far behind. When a site such as SmashWords has an automated procedure to inform you that a submitted book is not in conformance with the epub specification, having a commercial site failing to check their ebooks is risible. Would they publish a book without having it proofread?

Regards,
David

[Future Science]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I don't notice that much slowness with 2000 books on a uSD card compared to having 100 books in the main storage. I'm using a 16GB Sandisk card which was selected for having the best 4K block read/write speed of my collection of uSD cards.

Hi David,
to which specific Sandisk model are you referring to?
Thanks!

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Future Science

Hi David,
to which specific Sandisk model are you referring to?
Thanks!

I don't have the exact model number but it's a 16GB class 4 microSDHC. Came in a package with the micro to standard adapter for ~$16. After reading about the wide variation in write speeds for small blocks on SD cards, I used DiskMark to test my collection and was somewhat surprised to find that the small block speeds had little to do with the card's rated class and just how widely they varied (90KB/sec to 2MB/sec).

Regards,
David

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by frankenhooker

I may be completely wrong about this, but wouldn't the battery go down quicker the more books you have on your device ? I would of thought that the more books you have the more power it takes on boot up to index the files. As I said I may be completely wrong, it wouldn't be the first time.
.

The difference would be negligible. Also, I think it only "indexes" the files when you add a new one, not on every bootup.

[jackastor]

Originally Posted by vidarr

Hey all! I've bought the Kobo Touch a few days ago and I'm loving it, so far with 100 books, having read some of them, the device is working great.

Now, something I noticed is that the search function gets annoyingly slow depending on how many books there are in the machine. So, is it worth it to buy a SD for the Kobo? If I put like 300 books, will the search function become even slower than what it already is? If the answer is yes, whats the ideal size of the SD?

They say you can put 30k books on it with 32GB SD but if the search gets slower and slower...

And btw, what is the ideal number of books one could have without having the apparel being painfully slow?

Thanks a lot!

I dont think that the search time would be any length of time that would make much difference. I have over 3000 books on my Sd card and I am constantly adding books. I read and read like there is no tommorow and the one thing I always hated about paper books was that eventually I would have to clean house. With my ereader I can keep a small library at finger tips on a card that is no smaller then the fingernail on my pinky finger.
Imagine that an entire library on demand. REgardless of what you decide to do I can imagine erasing any books off my sd card and my ultimate goal would be to fill the card to capacity. Reading is my passion and my escape from the real world where I can be hero or just plain imagine the dragons and wonders that the author has created out of thin air.... whoops started rambling... but back to point... I have not noticed much of a differance in search time... currently... As far as an SD card goes it can store information for over 10 years with no need of power so not sure how much power that would drain but I am sure its negligable.


Regards

JAck

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by jusmee

The difference would be negligible. Also, I think it only "indexes" the files when you add a new one, not on every bootup.

It has to do a file system scan to find the books, check if they are in the database and then process any that are new. Plus, it can remove a book it thinks has changed. But, I agree, the power usage when adding a few books is negligible.