If you don’t need fancy-touch-screen like players, that do everything but plays music – IRiver h3x0 is still the best what you can get (well it’s maybe little too big but.. 🙂 ). My H320 is now few years old, I’v changed battery twice already – now came a time to make it SSD. It should be lighter (my 20GB HD weights 50 grams and converter with CF card only 17 grams!), more quiet, I should be able to use buffers (now assigned, to read as much as it could, music files in to memory) for other things, more reliable (no moving parts) and last – battery should last longer.

What you need?

• IRiver H320/H340
• Toshiba IDE 1.8” drive (40pin) converter to CompactFlash
• CompactFlash card itself (probably 4gig or bigger)
• Preferably RockBox

Where to get those parts?

I guess the only problem can be with HD2CF converter. But you can easily order it on DX. World wide free shipping – and here is link for you: http://www.dx.com/p/cf-to-toshiba-1-8-inch-ide-hard-drive-converter-10886. It’s called “CF to Toshiba 1.8-inch IDE Hard Drive Converter” and it’s price, is less then $5.

Compact Flash cards are common, there are “rumours” 🙂 on net, that it should be greater then 4GB CF card to be seen by IRiver – I’ve checked only 256MB – with no luck – and 16GB – with full success :D.

Let’s get to work!

When you put wrong, or not properly formatted CF card – RockBox will hang on booting (not letting even original IRiver firmware to boot in exchange) . My card was prepared under Linux, with fdisk. Just one primary partition, type C (W95 FAT32 (LBA)), formatted with mkfs.vfat and then filled up with whole stuff from old Hard Drive.

fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Disk /dev/sdc: 16.1 GB, 16139354112 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15391 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1       15391    15760368    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

There is also a tiny problem with jumper on converter board (with it’s height) – you can simply bend it – and make it joined forever 🙂

Summary

What can I say – just do it – you certainly won’t regret it!

Pros:

• lighter (50 g. of disk weight, 17 g. od CF + converter) – total weight now 152g
• totally quiet
• battery will last longer (not checked yet)
• reliable (no moving parts – you can shake it all night long 😀 )
• no screen flickering (when drive was spinning – I could see screen getting brighter and darker – now it’s solid stable)
• more RAM for fancy stuff (no need of buffering whole song, music database etc.)

Cons (yep there are some):

• you need to pay for it… ($5 for converter $35+ for CF)
• it’s slower when writing – my x133 CF is only x133 (150KB/s * 133) during reading – writing is much slower (<10MB/s) … but it’s completely acceptable since we mostly read from card in players.

And here is write test 🙂

sauron:~# lsusb | grep iRiver
Bus 001 Device 015: ID 1006:3003 iRiver, Ltd. H320/H340
sauron:~# df -h /mnt/usb
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1              16G  4.7G   11G  32% /mnt/usb
sauron:~# dd if=/dev/urandom of=test.file count=102400
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
52428800 bytes (52 MB) copied, 17.1483 s, 3.1 MB/s
sauron:~# ls -lh test.file
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 50M 04-08 21:13 test.file
sauron:~# cat copy.sh
cp test.file /mnt/usb/
sync
sauron:~# time ./copy.sh
real    0m5.650s
user    0m0.018s
sys     0m0.479s
sauron:~# bc
bc 1.06.94
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
scale=4
52428800/1024/5.650
9061.9469
9061.9469/1024
8.8495
8.85 MB/s