question about sd card

[baronrus]

with the new wifi kobo does any one have experience keeping thier entire ebook libary on the sd card? specifically does using the sd card significantly diminish your battery life? And once the ebooks are processed by the kobo what happens if you boot the kobo without the sd card in?

any other thoughts or experiences with the sd card would be appreciated

[Psyke]

Originally Posted by baronrus

with the new wifi kobo does any one have experience keeping thier entire ebook libary on the sd card? specifically does using the sd card significantly diminish your battery life? And once the ebooks are processed by the kobo what happens if you boot the kobo without the sd card in?

any other thoughts or experiences with the sd card would be appreciated

I haven't seen any difference in battery life; I've tried it with both, but lately I've just left it in. If you boot the kobo with no SD card once you've loaded it once, they just don't show up in your book list until you put the sd card back in, and the SD card is hot swappable, meaning you don't have to turn the kobo off to insert it or remove it.

While you really shouldn't run out of space on the kobo itself very soon, the sd card is good for carrying extra's or if you're sharing books between different kobo's (if they aren't DRM'd that is..)

[zoran]

Since I have version 1 of the reader, I'd speak only theoretically.
Card reader is just one more adapter and it takes some power to
work. It is not easy to know if it polls frequently. Next, file system
on the card has to be mounted. There is an easy way to look after
insertion and mount properly. Unmounting is the other story. Hot
removal is not what I would manage deliberately.
My point of fear is what is the power that comes to card adapter.
Is it sufficient? Upgrade via sd card went fine for me, but some folks
had had issues regarding adapter. Just to mention that I got head-
ache with sheevaplug adapter, till I found it heated a lot and should
not be trusted in that circumstance. The very question is: how many
books one wants to put to the device?
At the moment I see no reason to have books on the card on my
very own reader.

[Psyke]

Originally Posted by zoran

Next, file system
on the card has to be mounted. There is an easy way to look after
insertion and mount properly. Unmounting is the other story. Hot
removal is not what I would manage deliberately.

Hot Removal should not be a problem; On a PC, if you're writing files to it, it's usually a good idea to eject it after you're done, but it's usually not required because there isn't any delay in writing the files to the USB flash drives/SD cards (ie - when it says it's done copying, it's really done copying), unlike a regular harddrive which usually uses write caching to speed up operations (ie - despite the fact that it says it's done copying, it might not have finished yet because your antivirus or some other app wanted to do something first, but the copy is retained in memory until it can finish; if your computer were shut off suddenly, that data would be lost). .

In the case of the kobo however, it's only reading things off the card; All bookmarking is done on the kobo itself so it doesn't write anything to the SD card while in use. If you'd like to test this, after you've copied some books onto your SD card, lock it (the little slider on the side of it). This will prevent being able to write to it, or to erase the contents. It will work fine in the kobo in this state.

And on power usage, it really should be minimal, again because it's only reading from the card; if it were writing too, it would be a different story

[zoran]

Originally Posted by Psyke

Hot Removal should not be a problem; On a PC, if you're writing files to it, it's usually a good idea to eject it after you're done, but it's usually not required because there isn't any delay in writing the files to the USB flash drives/SD cards

Cannot say for win, since I used linux/bsd from the very start.

In the case of the kobo however, it's only reading things off the card; All bookmarking is done on the kobo itself so it doesn't write anything to the SD card while in use. If you'd like to test this, after you've copied some books onto your SD card, lock it (the little slider on the side of it). This will prevent being able to write to it, or to erase the contents. It will work fine in the kobo in this state.

However, it is the way operating system sees the file system mounted on
it. After usage, it has to be unmounted. I'm pretty sure embedded linux
has some tweaks and maybe, maybe does not check file system for cor-
ruption. If it does, next time it will try to check it and will complain if it
is read only. I cannot say right now, but I think it should be mounted
explicitly as read only.