PRS-500 slow to make bookmark and exit to the book menu.

[inew]

Played with my PRS-500 for a couple of days.

In the last week, my reader's bookmark would lost if connect it via USB.

Today somehow, I fixed that problem. (I tried to format the memorystick and did some other things. I did not know which one worked.) However, eventhough the bookmark works for me now, it becomes SUPER slow. It may take 1 minute to add/remove a bookmark. In addition, when I press the menu butten to get back from content to TOC/booklist/bookmark list, it also takes 1 minute. I did not have these problems before.

If I removed the memorystick, the machine works just fine. So, I think it may be the memorysticks' problem. I have tried to change to sd card, reimport the books, etc. But none of them works.

Btw, I have 60 books in flash and 100 in memorystick, which is not a large number at all.

Thanks for the hints to address this problem.

[inew]

OK, I played with it for a while and had the following findings.

If the SD card is locked (read-only), or if the SD card is full, the bookmark and menu button work smoothly as if using only internal memory.

If the SD card is allowed to write and not full, the bookmark and menu takes a looooooooong time. The length of the time is depended on the number of books (i.e., the size of cache.xml).

So, I think the eReader access the SD card and re-write the cache.xml each time the two buttons are pressed. If the re-write is not allowed, it will put the cache.xml in internel storage or memory, which will lost on power-down, reset, etc.

So the question is, can anyone come up with a solution to hack the machine and do not do the re-writing everytime the two buttons were pressed? We can write the cache.xml to SD card when certain button combinations happen.

[inew]

It can also done by mapping a key that can change the SD card to read only

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by inew

So the question is, can anyone come up with a solution to hack the machine and do not do the re-writing everytime the two buttons were pressed? We can write the cache.xml to SD card when certain button combinations happen.

Can you just make the cache.xml file on the SD card read-only to see if that solves the issue?

BOb

[inew]

tried before
does not work

In addition, what we need is the ability to switch between the two status. If the SD card is permanently readonly, we can not save the bookmark information into it.

So, what we need is:
1. in daily use, sd card readonly
2. before synchronize, sd card read/write so that the system can write the bookmarks.

[inew]

I did a little hack to the ereader. My idea is that "if the ereader can not write to the SD, it may not tring to do so and save some time."

First, I looked at the file system and noticed that the external memory is used as follows:
/dev/memorystick:
total 0
br--r--r-- 1 root root 121, 0 Dec 31 1969 cxd3452a
br--r--r-- 1 root root 121, 1 Dec 31 1969 cxd3452a1
cr--r--r-- 1 root root 243, 0 Oct 13 23:08 cxd3452actl
/dev/sdcard:
total 0
br--r--r-- 1 root root 122, 0 Dec 31 1969 r5c807a
br--r--r-- 1 root root 122, 1 Dec 31 1969 r5c807a1
cr--r--r-- 1 root root 246, 0 Dec 31 1969 r5c807actl

So I changed some of the hack here and add a function to change all the file in these two folder between readonly and read-write (The above file attributes has already been changed).

While I think this is a good idea, changing such file's attribute does not block the reader's access to the SD card.

During this process, I have already set up the framework that can run a linux program by pressing some button. If anyone has any clue how to address the problem at the OS level, please drop me a line.

[inew]

Could anyone please confirm that this not my machine's problem?

Does anyone else felt the delay for bookmarking and exiting from page to menu, if a (slow) memory stick is plugged in? Does this problem exist on unflashed machines?

Thanks

[ProDigit]

it's common knowledge that SD cards are flash chips in MLC configuration.
This makes them fast to read,reasonable to write for single files.

Usually SD cards get used in photo camera's where the device is either in read mode (to digitally view the photo's on the card), or in write mode.
writing orreading a single file, using single threaded reads.

Once you start reading randomly,or writing randomly;and especially when you start reading AND writing randomly at the same time,with more than 1 thread at the same time, the speed of an SD card easely can drop drastically,in the likes of 200x slower.

meaning a SD card with 20MB/s read, 12MB/s write can in such cases drop to less than 0,1MB/s data transfer speed.

In extreme case I had a sandisk rated class 6 (12/8MB/s) which performed under total random read/write multi-threaded stress only 10kb/s

see my test results here: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/advancedbenchmarks

I would suggest you find out if the PRS-500 with it's firmware update can read SDHC cards,and buy a cheap 4 or 8GB SDHC card if it's supported.

Sandisk Extreme III,Adata,or Topram have many good and reasonable fast SD cards!
There's a reason Sandisk standard SD/SDHC cards are slower. They are most compatible (I yet have to see a sandisk card that can't function on a device supporting these cards),however they are not responding as fast as other cards.

I can not speak for MMc cards of sony. I have no experience with them.