I am using a Kingston Elite Pro 4G in my Reader. It is formatted as FAT32. To the best of my knowlege it is not an SDHD card. All of the content on my card shows in the Reader catalog with a small card icon beside it. I have 18 books on the card as well as 9 songs and 46 photos. The files (73 total) on the card are organized into folders by type. The reader takes approximately 20 seconds to catalog the card when it is inserted.
I also have a Kingston 512MB card that was formatted as a FAT file system by my camera. When I insert it in my reader and connect to it via the Connect software, it is recognized. When I put a book on it, the Reader adds a "Sony Reader" folder that contains a "books" folder and a "database" folder. The Reader takes about 5 seconds to catalog this card. The Reader found some MP3s I had in a folder on the card though the folder had not been created by the Reader. Yes, my camera plays MP3s.
Kingston is a name brand that I have used before. I am in China so I never know if some electronics I buy are not knock-offs, but this card works well. I use a 4G capacity card reader that looks like a USB flash drive, only a little wider. It makes a convenient 4G USB flash drive when I choose to use it for that. I paid less than US$4 for it here. The 4G card was a hair more than US$40.
I too am disinclined to buy a high another capacity card for this device, now that I have seen the flat-file organization of the Reader. It is tedious going through many pages of the catalog. Maybe in the future, the Reader firmware will support directories. It would also be useful to have a mechanism that would prohibit the Reader from cataloging certain (pehaps specially named) folders so non-Reader content on the card, or a reserve store of reading material, would not burden the cataloging process. This would be easy to do by creating a configuration option that would tell the Reader to catalog only the "Sony Reader" folder and its subfolders.
As an experiment, I loaded an additional 595 files of MP3s and associated files (album art, desktop.ini) in 49 folders onto the Kingston 4G card using my card reader. This brought the total size of the files on the card to 2.869G. My reasoning was that if the Reader could not address all 4G of the card, anything over 2G would reveal the difficulty. When I inserted the card into the Reader, it took about 90 seconds to catalog the content. The Reader showed I had only 120 songs onboard. Obviously something was wrong! Then I connected the Reader to my PC and invoked the Connect software. It tried to access the card within the Reader and gave up shortly showing an error in the left menu section.
I then put the SD card back into my card reader and removed about 1G of MP3 files, taking the file size below the 2G point. The Reader took about 70 seconds to catalog the content of the card. It showed I now had 110 songs -- clearly untrue. Then I reconnected the Reader to the PC and started the Connect software. The Connect software now reported the content of my SD card as 18 books (as before), 99 pictures (a lot of album art from the MP3 folders) and 108 songs.
Next I put the SD card back into the card reader. I moved most of the MP3s into one folder and eliminated all of the album art and extra files. I wanted to eliminate folder nesting as a factor. Now I had 1.2G of Mp3s in 264 files. The card had a total of 1.76G in the filesystem. The Reader showed 110 songs. There should have been more than 260. The Connect software showed I had 108 songs on the card. It showed I had about 2.2G left out of a 3.8G capacity, but it wouldn't catalog all of the MP3s.
Conclusion: The Connect software knows the size of the SD card. Does this mean the Reader is correctly addressing all 4G? Probably not. I think the Reader is getting the 4G capacity info from the SD card in some way, but the addressing is not available for the full card. Maybe it sees the card as a 2G card or a 1G card. I suspect this is a Reader limitation. Is it hardware or software?
Sony, would you care to comment?
We can demonstrate that a given card works in the Reader, but it requires further effort to determine if the Reader can use the full capacity of the card.
Here is the fill-test. Load your SD card almost to capacity with a known number of files of a given type: songs, books, pictures. Now see if the Reader can enumerate them correctly and that the Connect software can see them. I suspect further that if you try to put more than a given amount of files on your reader using the Connect software (beyond the addressing capability of your Reader), the Connect software will go toes-up. I have not demonstrated this. it is only a suspicion.
It would be useful if we could report card models and brands that
do not work on the
wiki page. My suspicion is that Sony engineered the interface correctly, and that there are some card makers that are using flaky electronics. Working from that assumption would give us an idea if there is a pattern to the "incompatibility". There are knock-off cards on the market, so the picture may be muddied by that.
The only time I have had trouble with USB flash devices has been when I have an insecure connection to the PC and then inadvertently power up-and-down quickly. This erases them by destroying the file system. In every case I have been able to reformat them and use them again. It is a good idea to insert them firmly and make sure the USB device is supported physically if it is heavy or in a bad location, so it cannot pull itself loose.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by melchioe
Anyone else have the issue where the card is not seen in Connect if the Reader is already plugged in when Connect it started? This might have some bearing on some of the card issues reported in this thread...
|
When I first connect the Reader via USB and then start the Connect software, the Connect software successfully catalogs my SD card. I am using the February Reader firmware upgrade (Version 1.0.02.01300) as well as the current Connect software (1.1.00.13290). My Reader reports the battery level correctly after charging provided I disconnect the power cable and reconnect it -- per the reports of others.