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.. 🙂 ). 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
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