Support and General Use > Hardware
Rockbox and Compact Flash
bubblebobble:
I installed a 4GB ADATA compact flash card into my ipod mini when the original hard drive broke. It only lasted 2 months. My ipod no longer shows up in itunes or as a usb drive. I've ran RockBox on it for the past week and it would freeze sometimes when selecting a new song with Dynamic Playlist turned on. When I turned it off I had no problems running Rockbox. I think it was just a bad card because I was getting "Cannot Sync Ipod" errors in Itunes before installing rockbox.
I wanted to upgrade the card to either a 16GB Transcend Card or 16GB Kingston Card. Do these two work with RockBox?
scharkalvin:
My results with an F10 Gigabeat and an A-Data 16GB CF card have not been good. After a few hours of use it crashes with a corrupt filesystem, the boot loader and or kernel report a 'file not found' error. Reformating the card and reloading EVERYTHING (or sometimes just the .rockbox directory) being the only cure. I've read on other mp3 player forums of others having the same problem with CF conversion on the Gigabeat. However, others report success (but NOT with the A-Data CF cards). Maybe the AData isn't fast enough (it's only 40x, 133X cards seem to work?) Also there is a better CF-50pin IDE adapter that is built into a metal case the size of a 5mm thick 1.8" hard disk (available on ebay for $11-$50) that seems to work better.
If you have long term success (say it's been working for over a few months with daily use) with a CF converted Gigabeat F, please post what you did (which CF card, which adapter, any rockbox or bootloader patches, etc). Put it on the rockbox CF wiki too (so far there are only TWO entries there for the Gigabeat and mine was posted before my file system corruption started showing up).
I will probably get the better adapter (it won't bounce around inside the player!) and one of the OEM Toshiba 133X CF cards on ebay (reported to work with ipods) and try again.
UPDATE ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I got a new 32GB CF card off ebay on friday. It's a generic OEM card made with Samsung parts. It was reported that both the 16 and 32gb flavors of these worked with iPods, so I took a chance.
Still using the el-cheapo 50pin to CF adapter, but I cut down the jumper pins and soldered a wire on the back of the board (the case jumper was pushing against the back of the player).
This time I didn't have the usual problems of the USB transfers stalling out it I tried to drag and drop whole directories (or *GASP* directories OF directories) at a time. Also no failures to create directories either. I got it loaded with about 4.5gb of mp3 and ogg files now and so far (knock on wood) hasn't yet crapped out with file corruption (Jinx Jinx).
It DOES seem to take longer to shut down than with the HD though (why?).
What worries me is that rockbox might be constantly updating files tracking playlists and ratings which shorten the life of a CF chip (limited write cycles). IMHO, when using CF rockbox should not write to ANY files on the disk, and keep everything in ram UNTIL the unit is shut down. Then during the shutdown process save as little as possible to 'disk'. Config files are kept on the 'disk' but are only written when the user actually changes something.
The other little complaint is that the 32GB card 'only' seems to hold 30GB. I know disks are rated in DECIMAL GB and software reports HEXADECIMAL units. But I thought flash memory was rated in HEXADECIMAL units, so why the reduction in storage size?????
PS I wanted to change the CF wiki, I have a password and was granted permission to write to it awhile ago, now it won't let me in (takes my password, but the edit link returns a blank screen) do I need to ask for write permission for EVERY update?
bubblebobble:
I've had a 16gb Kingston Pro Elite card in my ipod mini second generation for about a month and it seems to be working properly.
Since compact flash cards are thinner than the original ipod harddrives I used some double sided tape to attach a strip of rubber from a cut rubber band to go in between the card and the case. I could hear and feel the previous adata card I had used rattling around.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version