why can't the reader address more than 2GB?

[NatCh]

I don't expect a Firmware update any time soon. In the weeks after the first update, I was seeing some indications that there might be a follow-on update before too long, but I haven't seen anything since then, which leads me to suspect that something may have happened to derail an update.

(As always, salt to taste)

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by mogui

Someone here has stated that the Sony Memory Sticks work OK at 4G. The SD cards won't. The Reader specs them at 2G max. The new revised standard for SD specs SD at 2G max. Some manufacturers extended SD to 4G, but did so in ways that were incompatible with each other. See the wikipedia article on SD cards. There has been a lot of discussion before on this topic in this forum. Also, there is a wiki page on this topic of SD card compatibility for the Reader. Some of the 4G cards there are incorrectly stated as working. If you find hard data on this topic you can edit the page.

I have a Chinese Kingston 4G knock-off that works fine in a card reader (also Chinese) that was touted as supporting 4G SD cards. It works OK when in the card reader, but fails the fill test. The Connect software also fails when connected to a Reader with a full 4G SD card.

After using various SD cards for a while, I took them out of my Reader completely. I have 65 books on my Reader now and the memory is only about half full! There is a suggestion here that SD cards drain the battery a little more quickly, and besides, more books can make the selection menu in the Reader uncomfortably long. You may feel differently.

Newer eReaders that come on the market may conform to the SDHD standard. SDHD will provide 4G of storage and up, plus it is backward compatible with your present SD cards.

Not everyone is using the reader for conventional books, 4GB is quite necessary for me if I ever want to go on a holiday with the reader, because 12 of my books have filled up my 2GB card already

Well, we'll see tomorrow if memorystick is working. Bad thing about that is, that there are a lot of fake memorystick around....

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by athlonkmf

... 12 of my books have filled up my 2GB card already

Great googely-moogely! What sorts of books are those?!?
And how fast can you get through a book that large?

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Great googely-moogely! What sorts of books are those?!?
And how fast can you get through a book that large?

those are mangabooks
And i've converted the largest volumecollections I've always wanted to read (again) and putten them into the reader.
The largest at this moment is about 300MB big with almost 7000 pages. (i'm now at page 5000)

I must admit, the reader have some troubles opening these huge files and parsing it takes awhile too. I should have splitted it up in smaller files...

But it's great to justify the Reader to my girlfriend and shock my friends.
"you know, those 3 cabinets full of manga you nagged about?"
"yeah"
"I got them all in my jacket's inner pocket now"
" "

[NatCh]

Oh, well that 'splains it.

You might want to consider running them through the ConnSoft (assuming you have a system that it will run on) -- it does that parsing for you (even if you're loading it directly onto the SD Card), and should save you some parsing time over what the Reader's relatively puny processor can turn out.

[mogui]

Originally Posted by athlonkmf

Not everyone is using the reader for conventional books, 4GB is quite necessary for me if I ever want to go on a holiday with the reader, because 12 of my books have filled up my 2GB card already

Well, we'll see tomorrow if memorystick is working. Bad thing about that is, that there are a lot of fake memorystick around....

Wow! That is some heavy reading! I have two or three fake SD cards here. I try them in the store and if they read and write I take a chance on them. I have been lucky so far. Fake Kingston's are common here in China. The real ones have holographic labels and cards inside showing a website where you can validate the serial number. I don't know about other brands.

[athlonkmf]

Just got my memory stick. A few comments first:
1)the memorystick is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW! Compared to my 133x SD-card, it's at least 50% slower to write or read.
2)Sony has become cheaper. No longer are they shipping an adapter with the stick.
3) The reader does not support 4GB memory stick, despite the stick being listed as supported here http://esupport.sony.com/EN/info/mspro-reader.html


Also... just like when you fill up a 4GB SDcard. if a stick is filled up to 2GB where the reader can't even write the formatting data, the reader will crash...

/me disappointed.

And even if the reader does support 4GB memorystick,it's so damn slow loading that you shouldn't bother using memorystick instead of SD-cards. Where an SD-card read a large book fairly fast (within 1 minute), the memorystick would need a couple of minutes.

Anyone care to give Sony a call about this?

[athlonkmf]

-*----

[athlonkmf]

Anyone living in the USA care to give support a call and ask them about this problem? If even their own 4GB memory sticks aren't working then there's something wrong I think.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by athlonkmf

Anyone living in the USA care to give support a call and ask them about this problem? If even their own 4GB memory sticks aren't working then there's something wrong I think.

What I might do is take a run over to the local Sony Style shop and see if they have such available and see if they can get it to work.

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I might do is take a run over to the local Sony Style shop and see if they have such available and see if they can get it to work.

Seeing that it takes over 2 hours to fill the reader up through Connect and 1 hour with a dedicated cardreader, i don't really know if they would want to help you. Unless of course, if you're a valued customer...

but where do you plan on getting 2.1 GB worth of ebooks?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by athlonkmf

Seeing that it takes over 2 hours to fill the reader up through Connect and 1 hour with a dedicated cardreader, i don't really know if they would want to help you. Unless of course, if you're a valued customer...

but where do you plan on getting 2.1 GB worth of ebooks?

Perhaps MobilRead?

[NatCh]

[jsuplido]

I loaded up my 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo with 2GB worth of ebooks from my Blackmask DVD. It's about 6000 ebooks ... and guess what? The Reader cannot seem to catalog all of those. It's been "trying" to do it for the past few hours... so I've just reset it.

So in the end, I've decided to just work with what internal memory I have. LOTS of external memory does not bode well with the Reader. Besides, what would I do with 6000 ebooks all in there at once? Music perhaps would be a better option (which worked as I've posted a few posts back).

So if anyone wishes to try loading up 10000 books... you've been warned

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jsuplido

So if anyone wishes to try loading up 10000 books... you've been warned

You've reached exactly the same conclusion that we all reach - for "standard" books, the 100 or so that will fit into internal memory is more than enough. It's just not worth the hassle of using external memory cards (unless you have to - eg to load books on a platform that doesn't support Connect).