Great post, no rant at all, thanks makes a lot of sense, points well taken.
that said of course ntfs has overhead but fat32 is also legacy and unwarranted in many cases, it puts a lot of restrictions in file size, directory structure, max filename etc. E.g. I just got me an external 2.5 wd hdd at 320gbs and the bozos had it with fat32, is there any reason for that? Surely not. That said, do you think ntfs would not work on an sd card?
"From a practical perspective, 32GB cards aren't even up to class6 speeds yet, which isn't exactly fast to start with. Lower capacity cards meet or exceed that speed easily. So perversely the more space you have to write to, the slower it gets. I could afford 32GB cards but can't be bothered to buy them because of that."
Do they classify them in classes? what is class 6? You think that would impact their perforance as a storage in the reader? The high gb card's low read rates I mean, because I was worried about that, and was probably looking for a smaller gb card after all an a usb pen drive, smaller yet faster too, although I have to ask you this if you are aware how much of an impact it has, because I rationalized that much of the book content should (ideally....) be buffered in that what is it 128 mb ram of the reader, which should be at worst a few tens of pages, plenty, to not have the card impact the reading speed. Of course such things as browsing the folders could be impacted, logically not that much either...but....
"16GB is plenty capacity for an -eBook reader-, and the 4GB filesize limit is plenty too. If you have a single PDF file that's more than that, you should rethink your document-deployment strategy (and I doubt it would be usable on the DR1000 if you could fit it on the card)"
I am an avid reader and I have wide range of interests for better or worse, so not 16 gb, not even 128 gbs can currently cover my library, of course I could crop it down to the bare essentials but that would be about 32 gb min. Look, take for example maths, some of us here are interested in them, or might need them for uni etc. Just to cover a few rudimentary fields in ebooks you'd need 3-4 texts per field, i.e. about 200 gbs pdfs on average, multiply that by at least 8-9 major areas of maths, it brings it up to min 1.5 gb, now add to that biology, computer science, chemistry, neurosciences, fiction (that alone could be huge)....etc.etc..etc... ADD to that all the html of news, interesting tidbits saved over the years and looking for a decent device to be read on a decent device ADD all the research journal articles too...it doesn't look good on 16gb thingy, and there's just no discussion on a 4 gb one.
"There will be no 64GB card in SDHC because 32GB is the limit of the spec, just like 2GB was for SD."
Is it? Wasn't aware of that, thanks for the heads up.
"(They recently announced a 64 Gb (Giga-bit- =8GB) memory chip which means half the chips for the same capacity)"
Who did?