Support and General Use > Hardware
Rockbox and Compact Flash
AlexP:
How true it is I'm not sure, but I have seen bandied around that the important line in the first card is
--- Quote ---Fully compatible with PC Card ATA specification
--- End quote ---
So I believe it needs to conform to the TrueATA spec to work with rockbox, although seeing as the OF is fine I assume you could fix that.
Edit: I have merged your two identical topics.
soap:
Until BigBambi merged your two threads I didn't know you had gotten Apple's firmware to boot.
scharkalvin:
I have converted a Gigabeat player to CF by using an adapter card made for this purpose for iPods. I'm using the A-Data 16GB CF that is reported to work with iPods. It mostly seems to work, but I do sometimes get a checksum error from the rockbox boot loader, and then the device powers off. If I try to power it up again right after this happens it usually will boot up into rockbox. I still do get either a checksum error, a file not found error, or a disk read error from time to time while using rockbox.
Changing the spin down time to 254 seconds (to try and prevent spindowns) seems to help (so maybe I can find in the code where this happens and remove the check for time to spin down, or add a "never" to the spin down time menu).
As CF cards get larger and cheaper they will become popular as replacements for failed disk drives in DMP devices such as iPods, Gigabeats, and iRivers. (Not to mention that such conversions make the devices more rugged and draw less battery power.) I think it would be a good idea to add conditional compilation hooks to the source code to optimize rockbox for such conversions. Some means of activating this conditional on top of any device specific ones in the build script would be needed. I would be interested in looking into this, but I'm not yet familiar enough with the source code to do this (any hints would be welcome).
In addition to any timing and protocol differences between CF modules and HD's, parameters that are constantly updated to a disk file should be moved to ram where possible to keep the number of disk writes to a minimum (to keep from wearing out the CF). This might mean losing the ability to remember where in a playlist, or a song the device was powered down in, unless this information is kept in an area on battery backed up ram that is not initialized during bootup.
saratoga:
--- Quote from: scharkalvin on December 31, 2007, 08:04:51 PM ---
In addition to any timing and protocol differences between CF modules and HD's, parameters that are constantly updated to a disk file should be moved to ram where possible to keep the number of disk writes to a minimum (to keep from wearing out the CF). This might mean losing the ability to remember where in a playlist, or a song the device was powered down in, unless this information is kept in an area on battery backed up ram that is not initialized during bootup.
--- End quote ---
Rockbox already takes great efforts to avoid using the disk since it uses so much battery power. Theres probably a handful writes to the disk per hour. The sun will burn out before you hit the write limit on that CF card.
zajacattack:
--- Quote ---The sun will burn out before you hit the write limit on that CF card.
--- End quote ---
Ha! Ha! Too bad the card manufacturers don't promise that!
So, out of curiosity, what would be the write limit on a CF card (and I know it's not a rockbox question, but I'm just wondering)?
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