To help anyone else who wants a high capacity Express
I have a Sansa Express 2GB. With a working microSDHC card in it, it now has 10GB! (well, around 9GB of storage space) It came with 01.01.01 firmware installed, so I downloaded the 01.01.12 firmware and installed it using MTP mode on my Windows Vista laptop.
The MicroSDHC card is a SanDisk 8GB microSDHC with MobileMate Micro Reader “For Cell Phones” (that’s what the packaging says) that I picked up new off of eBay. I first tried plugging the SDHC card directly into the laptop using the “Micro Reader” (which lets me plug it in as a USB drive). I formatted it as FAT32. Originally, I tried copying all the files onto it, and then installing it in my Express but when I did so Express recognized the card, but not anything on it. It showed in “System Info” that I had an empty 8GB external card (although it was full of songs). Instead, I got it to work properly by doing the following:
Format the microSDHC drive plugged directly into the computer as a FAT32 drive (roughly 7.6 GB).
Plug the formatted microSDHC card into the Express
Plug the Express into the computer
Make sure the Express is read by the computer in MSC mode
Open the “External Drive” part of Sansa Express in My Computer
Copy mp3’s into the External Drive
After they finished copying (it takes a while to copy nearly 8 Gigs), I unplugged it and the Express booted up and did a surprisingly quick Building Database (1 second at most). However, it then said, “Rebuild Database Do Not Remove SD.” I was concerned because it didn’t seem to be doing anything as it was stuck on this for a while. I just placed the Express down, walked away, and later on I remembered I forgot to check on it. I checked back on the Express and it was off. I turned it on by pressing the Menu button and after another quick “Building Database” (another second), it was ready to go!
If I go to Play All, it can reach all of the songs, from 2 Skinnee J’s to ZZ Top. It shows all the artists, and all that jazz too. The only (tiny) annoyance is the menus seem slower at first, but they must just be indexing all the different artists/albums/etc.
I have only one caveat: I do not know if it still has the 1000 song limit that some people have complained about. I rip my songs in high bit rate (mostly 320 kbps) so I only have 970 songs on it. There’s room for a few more songs, but probably not enough to get more than 30 more on there.
This is actually my first post, after doing the research, I picked up one of these 2GB Sansa Express from Ebay ($27.99 w/Free Shipping), I know to do the newst firmware. My question is, What make and class was the Micro SDHC (Sandisk? Class 2/4/6?) you used to get the total 10GB storage on your Sansa Express?
Did you find the machine slowed up quite a bit - in terms of navigation - with an 8GB card inserted? Mine certainly did. One thing that seemed to speed it up a bit was removing playlists from the machine.
My first priority request for any new firmware would be to speed up navigation when an 8GB card is inserted.
No, not really. only thing is, mine takes an extra 15-20 seconds in building the database off of the Micro SD card. Could be that I’m using a class 8 (8GB) card, I haven’t noticed a lag in navigation at all.
thanks kboof for the step by step in getting the 8gb sdhc going, it’s nice to have that kind of space on such a compact player.
I have not yet tried switching back to mtp mode, and I’m a bit nervous to do so, has anyone tried this and does it work alright? Personally, I’m happy with MSC mode, but I would like to get some playlists on there. I’m assuming from Grifter’s post that you can still work in mtp and put on playlists, but a little clarification would be handy.
Thanks
edit: I bucked up and switched back to mtp and my media players (wmp and songbird) are not recognizing any music on the device. And Winamp crashes right off… so first hurdle for me anyway…
aha! for it’s next trick my express seems to have kept everything on the expansion card and deleted everything on its internal memory while leaving all the empty folders!
