I'm glad you mentioned the host computer's role in this subtle error issue.
As I download a heavy volume of material on a daily basis, I have Windows
Scheduler clean and defrag my computer every night, and that has really
reduced the functional problems involving my CF cards.
David Bennett
Hello. I've been reading this list for a couple of months, and have
noticed what seems to be a somewhat common thread which appears to match my
experience, and which, if it's true, raises issues which I think should be
addressed in order to make the user experience for the bookport an even
happier one.
From what I can tell, there are a number of users who purchase their
bookports from APH, get them home, load them up with data, read from them,
and are completely happy with them. Then, after a month or two of use,
when books have been cycled through the unit, and the user is feeling more
comfortable putting more and more on the Bookport, he begins experiencing
difficulties when transfering data to the Bookport. Flash cards fill
unexpectedly during transfers, users encounter file coruption during the
reading process, or weird errors just happen, seemingly from no where.
the advice on this list, generally, seems to be that flash cards get
corrupted, and they either have gone bad, or need to be reformatted before
they work again for another month or two.
My experience coincides with this description. I have had my Bookport
for about four months, and have had to reformat the flash card I use most
often at least once. It's now been about six weeks since I last
reformatted my flash card, and I'm now beginning to see anomolous behavior,
which I suspect will go away if I reformat my card yet again.
All of this is to say that I think there is a subttle filesystem bug
in the Bookport which no one yet quite understands. On clean, i.e. newly
formatted flash cards, things work well. Then, as material comes and goes
from the filesystem on the flash card, some of it written by the host
computer, some by the Bookport itself, the filesystem becomes "dirty" in
the way that most filesystems become "dirty" over time. Directories become
fragmented as items are deleted and inserted, disk block allocations become
fragmented as well, and the efficiency of the filesystem on the flash card
becomes less over time. All of this is normal, and should be expected.
The rub is that the Bookport appears to not deal well with this loss of
efficiency, and as a consequence, becomes very fickle in its operation as
the filesystems on its flash cards age.
While, as someone suggested, running defragmentation programs against
the filesystems on one's flash cards for Bookport might aleviate the
problem, I'm not convinced this will totally help because I don't think
defragmentation programs zero out blocks they free up on the filesystems
they fix. The behavior I observe with my bookport leads me to believe that
the firmware makes certain assumptions about what is in its various file
buffers, and reuses them without necessarily properly cleaning them. For
example, I have an MP3 file on my bookport right now which reads fine,
except if I query the percentage status while the file is playing, and I've
read more than 50% of it. If I hit the 8 key when the latter half of the
file is playing, I get an FS buffer panic, followed by a bunch of audio
file read error messages, accompanied by choppy sound until I either stop
the bookport, or it comes to the end of the file in question.
Let me stress, though, that I'm not trying to suggest that I know what
the problem is, or how to fix it. However, I believe there is a problem,
and that it should be looked into. The bookport should be able to deal
with filesystems which pass chkdsk or scandisk, but which aren't
necessarily pristine in terms of not having been used, and users shouldn't
have to regularly reformat their flash cards in order to preserve
usability.
I love my bookport, but this issue, what ever it is, certainly adds to
my level of frustration using it, and makes it downright inconvenient at
times, while I cajole it into working.
-Brian
