Browse Tag: CF

IRiver H320 SSD – with 16GB CF card

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