Not enough space for Music DB...

[jimnms]

I have a Fuze and a Clip+, both 8GB. I keep the Fuze in the car and the Clip+ in my backpack, and have the same music synced to both. I synced some new music to them a couple of months ago. I'm pretty sure I remember it having ~200MB free on the Fuze and slightly less on the Clip+.

I only listen to music on the Fuze in the car when driving on the highway. It was working fine until yesterday. I turned it on as I was sitting at a traffic light before getting on the highway and I got a red screen with an error message saying:

"Not enough space for music DB. Please free 90MB."

Luckily I had my backpack with me and was able to get the Clip+ out, otherwise I would have had a long boring drive ahead of me without music to listen to because there are absolutely no decent radio stations around here.

I did some Google Fu and found some articles on Sansa's support page. It appears it happens on any Sansa player and is caused by filling it up too much or a corrupt FAT. It doesn't say how much space needs to be kept free though. I ran chkdsk on it and it showed no errors, so it must be over capacity. It shows 162MB free now, but I could have sworn it was closer to 200MB the last time I put music on it.

Question 1: Does the music DB grow in size over time because it has worked for 2 months before having this error?

Question 2: How much space do I need to keep free to avoid this error?