Photofast CR 5400 adapter + 32GB MicroSD

Yeah! My CR 5400 adapter finally came today!

Now with the two 16GB Kingston MicroSD cards I got a couple weeks ago, I have 32GB (29GB actual) of memory in my PSP. It's so sweet!

The adapter got loose somehow in the packaging and was sitting crooked. I was a little bit worried at first, but the bubble plastic wasn't sealed so it was easy to get into it. And it seemed fine.

I ordered the adapter from DealExtreme, it took about 2.5 weeks to get it.
















The two MicroSD cards slip into the sides of the CR 5400 Adapter.



Care has to be taken when inserting them... you need to hold the adapter by the edges, not the flat part... the adapter is rigid, but it's very thin plastic since it has to hold 2 MicroSD cards in it. (and memory Stick Pro Duos aren't all that big to begin with) It sorta feels like cardboard.

But once in, the MicroSD cards seem to fit very snugly.



You can use either 1 or 2 MicroSD cards in the adapter, but if using 2 they must be formatted together I think.

VERY IMPORTANT: The MicroSD cards inside the adapter MUST be formatted on the PSP. DO NOT FORMAT USING A PC. Once they are formatted, they basically are seen as 1 big memory stick. You also probably don't want to be pulling out the MicroSD cards & switching them back & forth between PSP and other use.... as mentioned, the adapter is very thin, and unless you reformat the MicroSD, you might have problems with non-PSP devices. All data should be transferred to/from the PSP via the USB cable (or wi-fi). Do not use a PC card reader, even one that is memory stick pro duo compatible.

Comparing the adapter with the memory stick pro duo that was in my PSP.



In it goes....



As soon as I turned on my PSP, I got this message. I can't remember if I got that message when I used a new memory stick....






Formatting took about 5 seconds for me.

I formatted it using my 3.71 firmware PSP Slim, because I want the MP_ROOT folder since the VIDEO folder won't play my PSP Video 9 encoded AVC files for some reason. While I use the VIDEO folder, I also need the MP_ROOT folder.





The exact capacity is 29.8GB after formatting. It also says "MagicGate™ Unknown", but I've heard that downloaded content from the PlayStattion Store *can* be read using this MicroSD/Adapter setup. I don't have any PS Store content anymore, so I can't absolutely confirm it.

So far I haven't had any problems playing media content with the adapter. Game saves & game play seem to be fine as well. But there is some slowness when accessing menus on the XMB. Using firmware 5.03, normally it only takes 3-4 seconds to go into the VIDEO icon. But with the adapter, it takes about 6-10 seconds. It's like older firmware like 3.71, that was slow in accessing the VIDEO icon.

Also, when turning on from sleep mode, normally with my Sony 8GB memory stick pro duo it would take 1-2 seconds to show how much memory the stick had. Using the adapter with 32GB memory, it takes 5+ seconds to count up the memory.

Normally when the PSP is hooked up to the PC in USB Mode, after ejecting the device in WindowsXP, and pressing the O button on the PSP, it goes back into "regular" mode almost instantly. But this adapter setup, after pressing O, it takes 5+ seconds for the PSP to get back into the XMB.

None of this has affected how video, music, or pictures have been displayed, there's been no lag as far as I can tell with any of that. It might be the Kingston cards I'm using, they are Class 2 speed. Or it might be the whole "they aren't memory sticks" thing. Or it might be that the PSP firmware isn't exactly made to handle 32GB of storage. I'm not sure.

I've only had less than a day to play around with it, so this is a pretty early review. It's pretty darn sweet to load a ton of stuff onto this stick and it's like a drop in a bucket. I loaded what I thought was over 800MB of content onto the thing, and the 29GB displayed didn't seem to budge. I thought that maybe there was some malfunction, but no, it's just a frikkin huge amount of space. I am down to 25GB left right now, as I loaded some more movies onto it.

EDIT: I have noticed that the memory stick door on my PSP-2001 doesn't close quite as tightly as it does with a regular memory stick (SEE POST for more info)



UPDATE: Came across this Photofast site that has a page on how to spot fake adapters.

If the page is down, the same info can be found here.

I learned most of what I know about this adapter from BoneOfWorld's Playstation Forum thread where he reviewed it. It's a great resource for anyone looking into trying this out.


later
don