CF Mod: Influence on battery life?

[Matze88]

Hi There!

I plan to mod my Iriver H320 with a CF card as I just dislike the harddrive more and more (no problems so far but it is 4 years old now). Does it have a real positive effect on battery life or is this just half an hour or something like that? Did anybody make some measures on that?

A related question: In the Wiki there is this Adapter:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.10886
which is known to work.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.18463

this one is also listed and it is a bit smaller than the first one. Did anybody try it out already? It may have another IDE connector (not the "Toshiba" one as listed for the first adapter)


And one last tiny question: What battery should I buy best? My stock battery has finished completely now, I get about 3 hours from it and that is **** :-). A few years ago I bought a ten euro battery from ebay which got bigger and bigger in some weeks until it pressed on the harddrive so it won't spin up anymore, then I returned back to the stock battery. I'm from Germany by the way.

[crypt@]

It really depends on your encoding of tracks.

On a good day (when the file system isn't corrupted - http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=14524.msg142243#msg142243, sigh...) I'm getting about 2-3hrs longer with CF than with HD. But 65% of the tracks are in FLAC, and another 15% in OGG.

I've just recently replaced the stock with a 2200mAH, this gives me just 45mins shy of 24hrs.

[Matze88]

Okay thank you. I'll definitively do the mod the next days, total cost is about 75 euros (a bit above $100) and that's really worth it.

Although it will be a bit off topic: Why don't you just increase the shutdown battery level so rockbox shuts down earlier? Maybe that will prevent corruption...

And my own answer to my battery question:
On misticriver they say cameron sino from licketyspitauctions (ebay - around $20 incl. shipping) are good. I will buy such a battery.

[Llorean]

Be aware, if you're using more compressed audio (FLAC files are big, and cause a lot more spinups in an HD) you'll see less gain than he did. Basically, the lower bitrate your files, the less often you need to spin your disk anyway (and for less total time) so the benefits if a CF card, which doesn't need spinning, decrease.

[crypt@]

I'm not so sure it is the battery level that causes corruption.

Fail of change the codes, I'm not aware of where I can change the shutdown time. If you are referring to "Battery Capacity" setting in the menu, that will not make a difference. At least that's what the manual says, "... only affects the accuracy of the battery life estimation as shown on screen."

[AlexP]

You would have to edit the code to change the level at which Rockbox shuts down then compile it.

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DocsIndex#For_Developers

[crypt@]

I thought as much.  Reading through powermgmt.c, being rather rusty with coding, I can see this will take some time before I can pinpoint where and what to do...

Having said that I've tried a couple of shutdown scenarios and so far the file system is holding up after svn-19817.

[dreamlayers]

I thought as much.  Reading through powermgmt.c, being rather rusty with coding, I can see this will take some time before I can pinpoint where and what to do...

See battery_level_safe and query_force_shutdown.  Also see the powermgmt file for your target (eg. firmware\target\coldfire\iriver\powermgmt-h300.c), which sets levels for those functions.

[crypt@]

dreamlayers: Thanks for the tip.