Non-'HC' SD Cards: Cognizant Homes

After researching prior to writing my SD-to-SDHC memory card interface transition missive a bit over a year ago, I figured that the two non-’HC’ 4 GByte cards from Patriot that I had in-hand would go to waste. Happily, however, I’ve recently found uses for both of them…though I urge you to tread carefully if you decide to follow in my footsteps, since there are no guarantees with out-of-spec hardware, either now or in response to future software upgrades.

When I signed up for a Sony Card and used it to buy a PS3 last August in order to take advantage of the in-progress $150-credit promotion, that purchase earned me enough Rewards Points that I was also able to snag an E Ink-based first-generation Sony Reader (model PRS-500) for $50. The Sony Reader came with a promotion of its own; a 100-free-Sony Classic eBook download credit on my Reader account, which I had to cash in by March 1. So last Friday night, I selected my 100 free items (lots of Dickens and Shakespeare, for example), then DSL-dumped them to my laptop hard drive.

From there, of course, my intent was to copy the files to the PRS-500. Its built-in flash memory storage capacity was insufficient to hold them all, but the Sony Reader also offers a memory card expansion slot…which works with both Memory Sticks and SD cards (a Sony product harnessing a non-Sony memory module standard? Heresy!). I saw in the Wikipedia entry that while SDHC cards weren’t supported in the PRS-500, folks had gotten 4 GByte non-SDHC cards to work. And indeed, that was the case in my situation; 100 eBooks put barely a dent in the Patriot card’s available capacity.

The other non-SDHC card found use this morning. In reading through the excellent reader feedback to Saturday’s post on Nokia’s Internet Tablets, I remembered that the only memory expansion I currently had installed in my N800 was the 128 MByte miniSD card (along with SD adapter) that Nokia supplied with the unit. I had virtual memory support enabled, but little incremental memory to use with it. So I replaced the 128 MByte card with my remaining non-SDHC 4 GByte card (which Googling about had informed me should work), and I populated the other available memory module slot with a Sandisk 4 GByte SDHC card (which a series of O/S patches last year added support for). Then I re-enabled virtual memory.

The Nokia N800 is noticeably snappier now, and I’m also now finally able to download a few maps to use with the Maemo-mapper application. The USA East and USA West maps combined represent a ~1.5 GByte payload; tack some audio, still image and video files onto the transfer queue, too, and you can see that I’ll be making good use of the additional storage capacity now available to me.

p.s…for any of you interested in obtaining one of the prized fully-PS2-backwards-compatible first-generation 60 GByte PlayStation 3s, Computer Geeks had some refurbished units on sale last week for $499.99, although inventory currently seems to be depleted. Might be worth checking back every once in a while…