Sandisk 1Gb Mp3 Player: JUNK!

31 December 2004 I purchased a Sandisk one-gigabyte mp3 player.

Allow me to give a list of its features at the time of purchase.

1. Storage capacity of 980 Mb.
2. ROMware compatible with Windows only.
3. Loose electrical contacts in the headphone socket, rendering it useless for playing music.
4. On-line technical support from people who assume you have a dead battery no matter what you tell them.
5. Unpublished set of restrictions on audio media in its ROM.

Let's talk about that a bit. How much is a gigabyte? Well, to begin with, a computing industry standard byte is 8 bits--8 on-off switches or binary (base 2) digits.

From there, the industry defines larger groupings in powers of 2. Thus, a kilobyte (kb) is not 1000 bytes but 1024 bytes--the nearest power of 2, 2 to the 10th power. 1000 bytes is 24 bytes short, or 0.98 kb.

The next higher order of magnitude spoken of in the industry is the megabyte (Mb). How much is that? Not 1,000,000 bytes. Not 1000 kb (1,024,000 bytes). 1024 kb. That's right, it's 1024 * 1024 or 2 to the 20th power, 1,048,576 bytes. Any device that serves 1,000,000 bytes is 48,576 bytes or over 47 kb short. It stores not 1 Mb but 0.95 Mb.

So finally, the gigabyte (Gb). 1024 Mb, or 1,073,741,824 bytes. If you want to cheat people, sell them a 1,000,000,000 byte device and call it a gigabyte device. It's 70 Mb short, and holds 953 Mb or 0.93 Gb, not 1 Gb. Nobody knows quite what Sandisk was thinking when they called a 980 Mb device "1 Gb". Certainly they cannot justify that with "overhead for the file system", as that's not the way file systems are measured.

I never did get full documentation on what mp3 files it was and wasn't designed to play, though I did eventually get routed to an on-line manual with some information about licensed wma files (Hello! wma files are not mp3 files, they're data in Microsoft's proprietary format.).

The bogus headphone socket made the thing useless as a music device. Alas, I was slow at reacting to this hardware problem and the warrantee lapsed before I'd thoroughly tested it. Technical Support at Sandisk tried to blame it on the battery and corruption of the software anyhow.

A curious feature of the firmware that originally shipped on the device was that if a file with filename beginning with a period (e.g. ".Trash", ".emacsrc", or ".desktopdb") got on the file system, the machine would refuse to boot. Technical Support at Sandisk tried to blame the host computer, and I had to go back and forth with them a few times before they realized they'd shipped the product with pre-release firmware (version 0.97c), and this bug was fixed with a later version of their firmware.

1. Support response about lack of documentation.
2. Support response about buggy firmware.
3. Support response about junk hardware.

The folks at Sandisk Technical Support were certainly cordial enough and business-like at all times, though they were also a bit clueless and I, the customer, had to lead them by the nose to my conclusions.

In sum, I cannot recommending buying Sandisk products. Sandisk cuts corners in hardware, testing, and support, leaving the customer stuck with the consequences.