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.. 馃檪 ). 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” 馃檪 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 馃檪
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 馃榾 )
- 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 馃檪
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
I wanted to change my Infitary HiB3 stepstick drivers with TMC2130, mostly to get it working more quietly but also because the perspective (meaby someday…) of other nice features of Prusa i3 MK3 where appealing. Sadly Infitary has all motor drivers SMD soldered so I had to get everything new. I ordered (what seems to be the best value-money choice) Chinese MKS 1.4 board and pack of 5 TMC2130 v1.1 stepper drivers. The only difference (except the price ;)) between Chinese 1.0 and 1.1 TMC stepsticks is that 1.0 are soldered to be used without SPI feedback data. You could change them manually from 1.0 to 1.1 (you would need to resolder 3 jumpers and change side of 4 connectors – see picture), but I assumed it’s too much hassle and I went with 1.1 directly Continue Reading
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