PRS-650 Additional Memory?

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by AlbertaCowboy

I like having a backup card just in case I'm on vacation and for whatever reason I have to do a hard reset, which deletes all content on my reader. If you have a card backup, you can just pop your card in and pick up where you left off. I shudder at the thought of being bookless on vacation!

Thanks for that info! I will definitely put my books on a SD card too now. I haven't used one on my Sony before because I have only 250+ books so far and I read that it can use up more battery if you use one.

[delphin]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

Thanks for that info! I will definitely put my books on a SD card too now. I haven't used one on my Sony before because I have only 250+ books so far and I read that it can use up more battery if you use one.

Don't sweat the power issue using SD memory, I didn't notice much of a difference.

This supposed battery life issue with SD cards has been HUGELY exaggerated.

My MP3 player also has an SD slot, and reading from the SD card, it can run about 15 hours straight and play a full audio book, which involves being active nearly constantly and reading HUNDREDS OF MEGABYTES of data, and it does this on a single AA cell rechargeable battery with about 1/3 the capacity of the one in the Sony.

Some self appointed experts have declared that this isn't a good comparison, because the Sony has to run for WEEKS, not fifteen hours, but what they are failing to take into account is -

A) The Sony only turns on the SD card while reading from it, otherwise it's in micro-power standby.

B) The REAL power drawn is proportional to the actual data read or written to the SD card, which in the case of an EPUB title is less than 1/100th of the data read by my MP3 player in playing a typical audio book.

C) ALL CMOS and NMOS devices use MORE POWER when actually being used, and this INCLUDES THE INTERNAL FLASH MEMORY. So though it costs a little power to wake up and use the SD card, this is offset somewhat by power saved by NOT READING THE INTERNAL MEMORY.

[elcreative]

Nicely put delphin... the whole "SD uses power" thing is grossly exaggerated... if I can usually get 10+ days with a 16GB SDHC card as opposed to 10+ days without and read several hours a day (that's hundreds of screen refreshes/page turns per day) in that time then what does a little more drain matter... you'd think that a card stole the eReader's life force or something with all the dire warnings...

[Kijac]

@Gadgetguy

I have a collection of several thousand ebooks ( 10 GB+) and I keep them only on memory card. And I use two cards - one card for science fiction, the other for the rest. My main memory is empty.
When I copy books over I find it easier just to use an SD card reader to copy them, instead of plugging the ereader in via usb.
To manage the files I use folders (with PRS+)

How do you manage the books with folders on a SD Card? Can you tell me more? Thanks!

[elcreative]

Try this section of the forum:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64510

Originally Posted by Kijac

@Gadgetguy


How do you manage the books with folders on a SD Card? Can you tell me more? Thanks!

[delphin]

Originally Posted by Kijac

@Gadgetguy


How do you manage the books with folders on a SD Card? Can you tell me more? Thanks!

The first thing you should know that it's not necessary to 'manage' them at all.

You can arrange things on your SD cards any way you please and the Sony just scans all your folders, finds all the books, scans the metadata, and adds them to the master book catalog along with the titles you already have in the internal flash memory.

The good news is - this means you don't have to put your book files in specific particular folders to get the Sony to see them.

The bad new is - this means that if you create some kind of fancy Authors/Collections/Books_in_the_Collections folder hierarchy, the Sony will just ignore this and create a simple single flat listing with ALL your files (the same as it does for internal memory files).

The thread that elcreative linked to above deals with how to load custom firmware that WILL let you directly access and manage folders on the Sony readers.

I found that this firmware made more changes to the interface than I liked, and decided to live with the standard factory firmware's single non-hierarchical listing.

This isn't actually too bad at all, because I can still organize books by authors or categories in folders on my SD card, just to keep things organized while loading files from the PC, while still being certain that the Sony will find and add all the files to the master listing.

Once all the books are in the master catalog on your reader, the standard Sony firmware has a fairly powerful search feature to help you find specific titles in your master book listing, and if that isn't enough you can use collections to sub organize your SD card files (though you are not supposed to try to split a single collection between internal memory and an external plug in memory),

To be honest, I think Sony was foolish not to provide BOTH a flat file view AND a folder based hierarchical view, but they don't.

Whether it's worth risking turning your reader into a 'brick' to fix this oversight is something every owner has to decide for themselves, but for me, it wasn't worth hacking the firmware just to get that feature.

[elcreative]

Delphin, you also didn't mention how many books you tend to carry with you on your reader... I use mine as a portable library and have around 25K of books on a 16GB card (which I can simply remove from one reader and put in another for immediate access with PRS+)... without PRS+ this wouldn't be possible as the usual Sony scan card feature, would either take forever or just crash.

Secondly, latest versions of PRS+ do almost nothing to actual firmware but rely on mis-direction of test routine to launch additional capabilities... this is done precisely to almost reduce to zero, the chances of making a brick... failure mode is default return to standard setup. I've installed PRS+ on 505, 600 and 650s so far with no problems... I'm not claiming that it is impossible to brick a reader with current version but I reckon that you'd have to try really hard to screw it up beyond it just not working...

Of course, none of this is relevant to you as you prefer the unmodded interface and are happy with it as it is... I agree that it would have been better to offer a choice but then that would need people to choose from another Menu option...

[delphin]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Delphin, you also didn't mention how many books you tend to carry with you on your reader...

Along with a few dozen mainstream titles, I have about 1500 public domain titles from feedbooks, which includes a mix of full length books, novellas, and short stories.

When I first transfered all those books onto an SD card, and inserted it into my PRS-650, there was a 2 or 3 minute delay while everything was indexed, but this seems to have been a one time delay, because now I can remove or reinsert the card with only a few second change in the startup delay.

Extrapolating to several thousand books, I can see why you would find the 'no scan' feature of the PRS+ firmware very handy.

I wouldn't trivialize the danger of 'bricking' your reader because I have already read reports from at least two individuals who killed their 650 while trying to install custom firmware, and when this does happen, there doesn't seem to be a damn thing you can do except send your reader off to Sony and hope they will still honor the warranty.

The good news is that this danger seems to be mostly associated with flashing the reader for the first time, because that is when the main internal embedded Linux root file system is modified and re-written.

AFTER you get past this first slightly dangerous point, your comments about how PRS+ works are essentially correct and it would be fairly difficult to do any permanent harm (because if PRS+ locks up, you can always stop the loading of PRS+ by hooking up the USB, then remove the offending code).

Looking at that first time flasher code, it looks like it loads a copy of the new firmware image onto the reader's flash drive data area then checks it via an MD5 checksum to make absolutely sure that nothing is corrupted, then reboots and copies that new image internally to the Linux root partition on the reader.

Doing it this way, in theory, even this first more dangerous flashing operation SHOULD be a fairly bullet proof procedure as long as you don't loose battery power, or intentionally force a power down while the copy is in progress.

So I must admit that I am mystified at how a few folks managed to brick their readers anyway, but THEY DID, so I think that a little caution is in order.

[BeccaAnn]

For me, I like carrying my entire library with me, as I never know what I might be in the mood to read. My 505 has two slots for expandable memory. I keep my all time favorite books on the reader, have public domain and other published books on one card, and use the second card to hold all my fanfiction that I've downloaded from the net. I use Calibre to organize it all and transfer to my reader.