"4 GB" MP3 Players

Many people will be buying MP3 players around now, and Ipod nano clones appear to be most popular. The original Apple Nano costs over 120.00, so to pick something up with equal memory, with the ability to play video and jpegs along with an FM radio seems too good to be true. Sadly, it is too good to be true. It seems the vast majority of these items for sale on Ebay are not quite what they claim to be. They look right, and in the "Memory Info" menu, they display will read as 4 GB. However, it is possible to hack these players to display a false memory reading. You'll even see the files happily loading onto the player, but when you try to play back any files loaded after the reduced limit has been reached (in my case less than 500 Meg!) you get all kinds of file error messages with the bottom line being that they will not play.

Another annoying aspect these sellers expoit is to give the impression that they are based in the UK. In my case, the seller indicated they were in Leighton Buzzard and the items are pictured with Union Jacks, but are really in Honk Kong, so if it comes to returns or refunds there is no end of trouble locating them then agreeing who will pay for postage and whether it will be national or international postage rates.




This from mympxplayer.org , from someone who knows how these things work better than I do...


"I never thought there would be anything fishy about 4GB players because i knew Apple had them (didn't realize they use two chips), but after finding this site, thought i should check it out straight away.

The first thing that caught my attention is that most of the flash based players all operate with a FAT file system and specify that they should only be formatted with this type. Of course that means a limitation of 2GB. When i hooked up my player, i noticed it was FAT32 (therefore able to support drive capacity greater than 2GB) and after formatting it as FAT32 again, it worked just fine. I couldn't format it with the "MP3 Player Utilities" program though, obviously because it saw it as FAT32 but wanted to format it as FAT. Windows reported is as being 3.99GB after the format.

The next thing i did was fill it up with more than 2GB worth of stuff. This worked no problems. However, when playing songs on the player, i found that once it got to an mp3 that was transferred on after the 2GB mark, it would restart (as mentioned in some other threads). I played around with the amount of files on there, and found the limit to be just under 2 billion bytes, ie: "2GB", or 1.86 real gigabytes.

I thought i'd give the hardware the benefit of the doubt and put it down to a software issue whereby the player couldn't support more than 2GB of data in the mp4 directory, so i created a new directory in the root and chucked mp3s in there aswell. Functionality of the mp3 player was fine, (ie: no restarting), but after transferring those files back onto the computer, they sounded all over the shop, as though they were playing random bits of the previous mp3 i had listened to. Windows seemed to think they were properly sized though.

This left me with the option of physically checking the memory, so i pulled apart the player tonight and checked it out. The memory is:

SAMSUNG 616
K9WAG08U1M
PCB0

Looking at Samsung's site, there are 3 versions in the family of flash. You can download the specification data sheet -here-

The base chip is the K9K8G08U0M, which is 1G x 8bit, and the K9WAG08U1M (2G x 8bit) and K9NBG08U5M (4G x 8 bit) chips are based off that. The website is -here-.

So basically,
K9K8G08U0M = 1GB
K9WAG08U1M = 2GB
K9NBG08U5M = 4GB

The part number decoder can be found -here-.
8G stands for 1GB, AG stands for 2GB, and BG stands for 4GB

Looking at pics of a 4GB Apple ipod nano, i noticed that my chip was the same. But looking closer you can see that the daughterboard which houses the flash has a chip on both sides, ie: 2x 2GB chips to make up 4GB. Pics -here-.

So it turns out my 4GB player is really a 2GB player
I am going to put it back together and contact the ebay guy and see how i go with that. I am not expecting much, but i forked out an extra $75 to go to 4GB so i have nothing to lose.

What i would like to know is how Windows (and the player itself) thinks it's a 4GB drive, even after formatting, and how i was able to transfer data to a space that didn't really exist, and how the assumed size of the files was able to remain after they were transferred back (even though they were stuffed). If anyone knows the story behind that it would be great to hear it.

So there you have it, the 4GB chips do exist, but be very careful about what you actually get. (Seems the price of the chip alone is a little over $AUD 100, check out www.multiarcade.com ). As for 8GB chips, there is no mention of these on Samsung's site so i would stay well clear any advertised on ebay and the like. They are most likely 8gigabit chips, ie: really 1GB.