CR-5400 doubling up my folders

Yipes. So the latest news on my replacement PhotoFast CR-5400 adapter.... it was working fine, but I knew the real test was how it would write data to the MicroSD cards, game save data and anything I drag & drop to it.

I'd put 1 or 2 new videos in just to see if everything's alright... they loaded onto the card & played fine. I deleted them from the PSP.

But now I'm looking at the content of my PSP's VIDEO folder on my PC & find that the folder that had those videos has doubled!



How is that even possible?? I thought that 2 identical file names couldn't exist in the same area. They both have the same files in them. And when I moved a new video to ONE of them, it shows up in BOTH of them.

This is not good. Not good at all.

But on the PSP, there's only 1 "taped tv shows" folder. I'm not sure if the data is being doubled or if it's just a hiccup of the adapter. The video I transferred is House of the Dead which I taped last night. It looks really cheesy bad (I can't believe someone made a movie based on that videogame!) so if I lose it, not a big deal. Still, I'd much rather my adapter work properly....

I will update if anything further develops.



later
don

fake memory stick adapter?

Man... I've been having problems with my PhotoFast CR-5400 adapter I bought back in March.

Last night I was playing Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron on my PSP... I was playing the Galactic Conquest mode, and I wanted to save the game before I quit. When I went to do so, the memory stick light was flashing for a long time... way longer than it should be-- it usually saves game data in 1-2 seconds. After flashing for like 30 seconds it finally came back to me with a "Game save failed" message. So I tried it again, and again another save fail.

So I just exited the game & checked out the data at the XMB save data menu. Sure enough there were 2-3 corrupted files. Very odd. When I tried to delete them on my PSP, the delete failed! Not good.

I then hooked up my PSP to my PC in USB mode, went in to see these folders/files, tried to delete them. I managed to delete 1 folder with files inside them by deleting the files 1 at a time. But there are 2 corrupted folders that Windows won't allow me to delete! What's worse, when I come out of PSP>SAVEDATA my PC stops detecting any info on my PSP at all! Yikes...... NOT GOOD AT ALL.

So I turned off my PSP & charged it overnight. This morning I turned it on, when it got to the XMB, there was NO MEMORY STICK icon at all, and the memory stick light was pulsing... like once per second. This looked very, very bad.

I restarted the PSP, same problem. Then I put the PSP into sleep mode, and turned it back on. The memory stick showed up normally, with all the data it should have. I'm glad I can still access it. But I can tell it's going to fail again, and this is the end for it.

I think it's the adapter, it's possible it could be the cards, which is really bad since they cost so much. I dug out the adapter packaging, as show in the pic above, and checked out that page put out by PhotoFast on how to spot fake adapters. I noticed that my packaging doesn't have shiny silver lettering, it's just plain white. I'm thinking that the adapter I got from DealExtreme is probably fake.

I do have a rule when buying products from places like Deal Extreme who sell a lot of fakes: never buy a battery or memory cards from these types of places. If it's just a hunk of plastic like a battery cover, it probably doesn't matter if it's "real" or fake, but actual electronic stuff-- as long as you know what you're getting. I sorta broke the rule by buying that adapter, but it was the only place I knew of that shipped to Canada.

And for 8 months, it worked awesome. I haven't had any problems with it at all until now. It's just strange that it would go after all this time. Usually fakes make themselves known right away; they generally don't work right out of the gate. Maybe shoddy materials just couldn't take the stress over the 8 months of use?

I just ordered another CR-5400 adapter from a Canadian site... I really hope it's authentic, as I paid a lot more for it than at Deal Extreme. As long as it's authentic, it'll be worth it.


later
don

Photofast CR-5400 with PSP memory stick door

So it's been a week or so since using the Photofast CR-5400 in my PSP. I haven't encountered any issues with it other than what I posted in my initial review.

But 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:



Keep in mind this is a pretty extreme closeup. And it doesn't seem to affect the PSP or memory stick usage at all as far as I can tell.

It's just that I think the door is usually more flush with the side of the PSP like this:



I don't think there's too much to be concerned about except maybe dust getting in there? But even that seems like a small worry. Just kinda weird, I guess maybe the CR-5400 adapter might be a millimeter or so longer than a regular memory stick pro duo?




later
don

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