SD card size

[HarryT]

I said exactly that 2 messages above, Jon .

[JSWolf]

I did miss that. Sorry.

How much internal ram does the original Gen3 have left for content?

[HarryT]

On both models the system files use about 10MB, so on the original model you're left with about 54MB for storage, and on the new model about 500MB.

[JSWolf]

Even with the 505's lesser free ram then the new Gen3, I don't find the need for external memory to hold content. I don;t read Manga or comic books. So I don't have huge files full of pictures. I keep about 80-100 eBooks on my 505. I don't have any problems finding something I want to read.


With only about 54mb free, I can see where the suggestion to use an SD card comes from. But these people giving such advice should take into account the new model with the increased ram capacity.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Argel

I understand that is supposed to be the case but I am disturbed by the number of messages from people saying that they have problems running their systems with large cards and have had to retreat to smaller capacities. Are they all misguided?

Maybe the cards were differently formatted?

Assume that some card have a problem. People will probably test a large card first and if they have problem change to a smaller card. So people will report more problem with larger card in spite of the problems being distributed even among card and users.

[HarryT]

A friend of mine (on my recommendation) recently bought a Gen3, and the SD card she got with it (from Bookeen) appeared not to have been correctly formatted by the manufacturer. All the content on it became corrupted after a few days. Reformatting the card as FAT32 using Windows Explorer completely solved the problem and it's been fine ever since.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by tzutolin

Yes, you are absolutely right. There is no point to get a SD card more than 2GB for just reading books.

<giggle>

You say that now. I have about 3,500 ebooks on my device (a PalmOS PDA) scattered over two 2GB SD cards. I'm about to upgrade to 4GB cards because I'm running out of space. (The ebooks take about 1.7GB, but the amount is constantly growing.)

My device doesn't support SDHC, but there are 4GB non-SDHC cards available.

By the way, which brands of cards you are using, and how long you have used it?

In my case, a mix, with Lexar Media, Patriot, PNY, and SanDisk in the mix. (One of the 2GB cards is a SanDisk Ultra II, and the other is a Patriot. I have other cards in 256 and 512MB capacities.)

There are four manufacturers I'm aware of of the actual flash memory used in cards: Hitachi, Panasonic, SanDisk, and Toshiba. The other card vendors buy media from one of them and put it in their own packaging under their own name.

I haven't bothered with the newer high speed cards. Those are intended for digital cameras with fast cycle times, and I doubt my device will actually make use of the higher speeds.

Upgrading to 4GB cards will require a new driver. Older versions of Palm OS supported cards with a FAT16 filesystem, which has a maximum volume size of 2GB. When Palm issued the Lifedrive, which has a 4GB micro-HD, they had to implement FAT32 support to handle the larger volume size, and the FAT32 driver was ripped from the Lifedrive and patched to run on other Palm OS 5 devices. It works in my device, so...

I've found all of the cards I have comparable with one exception. The PNY card, which uses Toshiba media, has write speeds an order of magnitude slower than the others. I ran benchmarks on the cards, and the PNY was taking so long in a test that wrote a 1MB file to the card and measured the time taken that I thought the device had hung and was about to reset it. That wasn't a problem for me, as I put files on the card with a USB reader, and the data on that card will be read but not written to, but I did cross PNY off my list as a supplier of future cards.

My general rule for this is to toss out the most expensive and least expensive cards and look at the stuff in the middle. You get what you pay for, and I've heard horror stories of things like flimsy packaging from folks who bought the cheapest card they could get.

I generally go for SanDisk, but I like Lexar Media as well.

David

______
Dennis

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

A friend of mine (on my recommendation) recently bought a Gen3, and the SD card she got with it (from Bookeen) appeared not to have been correctly formatted by the manufacturer. All the content on it became corrupted after a few days. Reformatting the card as FAT32 using Windows Explorer completely solved the problem and it's been fine ever since.

The card I use was a 2G card previously used in my camera so the camera had formatted it. These kind of things seems to happen. One batch of N810 hade wrongly partitioned internal memory which could in some cases cause problem. Cards seems not to be identical and they probably just had copied an image to the card and the image was bigger than the card.