Sandisk Sansa View

Ed

Ed

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I picked a Sandisk Sansa View the other day. I had purchased a Sandisk Sansa 4GB player for my wife previously and she really likes it. They interface with the Rhapsody music service and are well thought out players. I mainly like the fact that I can sync them up with ease to Rhapsody and select any songs or albums out of the millions that are available.

I loaded mine up with a nice variety of bari players and some Getz, Sims, and Harry Allen on tenor as well as a host of other sax players and pop music that I like. I've only used up a little over half of the 8 GB of internal storage and when I fill that I can always put a 8 GB micro SD card into it. :p
 
I have a vintage 2003 Creative Zen Nomad Jukebox. 30gb.

* Hard drive died two years ago. I luckily had a spare 30gb drive I could install (it doesn't support larger drives and only supports 30gb drives from about 3 manufacturers).
* Battery died two weeks ago.

I replaced both -- the drive being free and the battery being $10. The player itself was less than $80.

Yes, it's as big as ... a 3.5" hard drive ... but I wanna see someone that got a better deal for a better size MP3 player that will last for 5 years.
 
While it would be expensive I think the new solid state drives would be great in this application.
 
pete said:
I have a vintage 2003 Creative Zen Nomad Jukebox. 30gb.

* Hard drive died two years ago. I luckily had a spare 30gb drive I could install (it doesn't support larger drives and only supports 30gb drives from about 3 manufacturers).
* Battery died two weeks ago.

I replaced both -- the drive being free and the battery being $10. The player itself was less than $80.

Yes, it's as big as ... a 3.5" hard drive ... but I wanna see someone that got a better deal for a better size MP3 player that will last for 5 years.
Click to expand...

Hey Pete, where did you get replacement drives for your Zen ?
I have 2 Zen micros with bad HD's (5GB). I would like to take a shot at replacing them if it's cheap enough.
 
I'll chime in here even though my name is not Pete.

If you can pull the unit apart you might be able to find the same hard drive model on eBay. I had to do something similar with a computer I have (a long story).
 
Great ! I have already dismantled it to fix the phono plug connection.
I didn't even think to try Ebay. Worst part is, I'm on Ebay at least a couple times a day.
 
Connical said:
Great ! I have already dismantled it to fix the phono plug connection.
I didn't even think to try Ebay. Worst part is, I'm on Ebay at least a couple times a day.
Click to expand...

Just a couple of times a day. What kind of sax player are you? :D
 
Connical said:
Hey Pete, where did you get replacement drives for your Zen ?
I have 2 Zen micros with bad HD's (5GB). I would like to take a shot at replacing them if it's cheap enough.
Click to expand...
First, while Ed's idea is a good one, please note if you're talking "5gb", you probably have a solid-state/flash drive. These are expensive to replace. You may find one on eBay -- but I doubt it.

Creative has players CHEAP on their clearance page. You might do that, instead.

I got my drive out of a Toshiba laptop that was dead, gone and buried. But it was a 30gb standard notebook hard drive.
 
Ed Svoboda said:
While it would be expensive I think the new solid state drives would be great in this application.
Click to expand...
I could *try* swapping my 30gb standard hard drive with a 32gb SSD if a) I could find one with an IDE connector, not SATA and b) I wanted to spend $1000.

As mentioned above, the small-size hard drives are flash drives. They ARE solid-state, by definition.

I'd actually like to have a terrabyte drive in my player because I can use it for file storage. However, that'd also be prohibitively expensive.

Again, the point is allegedly moot in my case, as the player I have is not supposed to support a larger hard drive.
 
I've been playing around with computer for about 25 years and I'm amazed that I can buy a 8 GB micro sd chip for $79.00. I remember reading about how to get to that level of storage we would be doing it with holograms.
 
I remember paying $100 for a megabyte of memory for my Mac SE/30.

That'll buy me between 2 and 4gb, now. Or 2gb and an SE/30.
 
I got myself a Sansa e280 8Gb player a few months back. Really great player. At the moment I just use it for mp3's, haven't used the photo and video options yet. It replaced my old 512 mb Creative and I figured the 8 Gb was maybe a bit overkill, after a few a weeks I knew it wasn't :).
 
No luck on Ebay. I fear that finding a cheap source for these parts is pretty slim. Even though I spent over $500. on these purchasing them for my daughters, they're hardly worth dumping any more money into them.
Just another disposable high tech item of the new millenium.
 
HaRon said:
I got myself a Sansa e280 8Gb player a few months back. Really great player. At the moment I just use it for mp3's, haven't used the photo and video options yet. It replaced my old 512 mb Creative and I figured the 8 Gb was maybe a bit overkill, after a few a weeks I knew it wasn't :).
Click to expand...

The micro sd slot can expand the storage so don't forget about that. I'm thinking about putting 8 GB in my wife's 4 GB unit. I added 2 GB to mine last night (I had it sitting around) and threw a couple of videos on to test that. The videos played fine but the screen is really too small.
 
Thanks Ed, good to know the micro sd works ok without delay etc. Primary use is for music and I see the photo and video option as a nice bonus. The big plus for me was that the players that have this option all have a nice display for browsing the musicfiles. Although the screen is small for video, I think Sandisk gives a lot in a small and slim design looking at the whole package.

Strange thing is that the european versions all are without the fm radio, this is an importtax thing. Radio adds to the taxes. Probably just a firmware issue, but I just leave it as is.
 
I haven't used the FM radio yet. It mainly sits in my car and occasionally comes in the house to resync with the computer. The ability to record seems interesting and could come in handy once in a while.
 
Ed Svoboda said:
I\ The ability to record seems interesting and could come in handy once in a while.
Click to expand...

That refresht my memory, this is the reason we don't have the fm radio in the Sandisk products. Direct recording from radio to mp3.
Actually funny because here in the Netherlands downloading music content no matter how it's been made available is completely legal. P2P etc. and downloading is no problem here. Uploading however is illegal. The law works in mysterious ways.
 
Speaking of the micro cards,

I always thought one of the selling points of havening an MP3 player is so you could have your entire music library on one device, rather than needing an entire CD tower to store it all. This is also one of the reasons I didn't jump and get even an 8gb player: I have too many CDs. (Yes, I'll grant you that micro cards take up less space than CDs, but they're also easier to lose.)

Just an opinion.
 
That's one of the reasons I like the Rhapsody subscription. It keeps me from as many CD's. Since I'm a jazz fan and a classical music fan it is impossible to expect that all of my eclectic tastes will be adequately covered.
 
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