Mini Kobo Mini best Hack/Mod

[Quoth]

But how much time do you spend sending ebooks to the ereader rather than reading?

I agree it makes some difference and there are some old very slow 4G cards out there. I was suggesting that A2 not being available for 8, 16 or 32G cards wasn't an issue if it's a decent card anyway.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Quoth

But how much time do you spend sending ebooks to the ereader rather than reading?

I agree it makes some difference and there are some old very slow 4G cards out there. I was suggesting that A2 not being available for 8, 16 or 32G cards wasn't an issue if it's a decent card anyway.

Umm... the issue is not with sending books to the Kobo, the problem is with the normal operations of the Kobo where the underlying Linux OS uses a lot of small block read/writes. This discussion was beaten to death close to a decade ago and I lack any desire to re-fight that war. I've attached a DiskMark test on a local hard drive. The first 3 rows of numbers don't matter that much but the bottom row is, for my purposes, the important numbers. You will notice that in this case, the sequential read is about 100 times the random 4K block with queue width 1/single thread number. Testing a µSd card for a Kobo ereader, that last row has the most effect on the performance of the Kobo during reading.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Cootey

From my searches, 32gb microSD cards don't come in A2. Only 64GB cards and up offered that. If they exist, I can't find them. Do you know where I can get an A2 32GB microSD card?

I haven't been able to find specs on the microSD card slot inside the Kobo mini. However, since the original 2GB microSD is formatted FAT32, not exFAT, the slot probably only supports SDHC with a maximum capacity of 32GB, just like FAT32.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

I didn't know a2 only started at 64GB. There's no A2 32GB.

What I suggest is that if you do have a spare 64GB microSDXC card, try that in the mini and if it works, get a Sandisk A2 64GB card.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Actually, the speed of the card can be quite important to a Kobo ereader. Sadly, it is not the sequential write speed which the one most heavily advertised but the small block write speed that is critical. Over the years, I've found that Samsung and SanDisk cards tend to have the best small block write speeds.

To quote a message I wrote back in 2014:

Now that is very interesting. I have noticed that my Kobo Mini is considerably slower now with the 8 gigabyte microSD card. It's not unusable, but it is a Kingston card, and now I have a reason why it's so much slower. I'll make sure to pick up a SanDisk card when I upgrade to 32 GB.

These microSD cards aren't just for storage. They're the internal hard drives that hold the operating system. Slow performance will affect everything, which is why I became keen on card speed.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I didn't know a2 only started at 64GB. There's no A2 32GB.

What I suggest is that if you do have a spare 64GB microSDXC card, try that in the mini and if it works, get a Sandisk A2 64GB card.

I had two Sandisk A2 64GB microSD cards on hand. After using “dd” to clone the original 2GB card, I used Gparted to resize the partition (dd clones everything exactly—2 Linux and the FAT32 Kobo partitions, including their original partition sizes). I copied my Mini’s backup files onto the KOBOeReader partition, put it back into the SD card slot, then booted it up. Voilà!

It took a bit to boot, but it got there in the end, and I repaired my Kobo account to get rid of any corruptions.

It *is* faster than the 8GB Kingston microSD card that I had, but it’s not turbo charged. After all, it’s formatted FAT32, not exFAT, so it can’t take advantage of all the "new" speed enhancements. Still, though, it’s a nice hack for the Kobo Mini which originally shipped with just a 2GB drive. Things are snappy again AND I have plenty of room to grow.

Next I’ll stick more than 32GB of ebooks on it to see if things still work when storage exceeds the original 32GB microSD card limitation. It that works, I might consider a larger microSD card upgrade in the future. Thank you, everyone, for your input.

Update: I’ve used up over half of the storage now, and the Mini is still zippy and responsive. At this point, I would recommend upgrading your internal microSD card to a Sandisk A2 64GB microSDXC card. If I see a good sale on 128GB or higher SDXC cards in the future, I may play around with them and report back here.

[JSWolf]

@Cootey, your welcome. Happy to help.