240 GB iPod 5G

[Trexx]

Hello everyone,

I recently came upon an article on CNET about a company that will upgrade your 5G iPOD (30, 60, or 80GB versions) to a full 240 GB hard drive.  THe link is here:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12519_7-10156972-49.html?tag=centerColumnArea1.2

The company that does the upgrade is called RapidRepair and this is the link to the upgrade:  http://www.rapidrepair.com/shop/3119-hard-drive-disk-mk2431gah.html

The advantages for those of us who have managed to fill up our current 5G iPods are obvious, but before shelling the US$300 that it would cost to upgrade, I would like to know that the bootloader and current releases would work on it and that Rockbox software would recognize the new (much larger) capacity.

Yeah, I know, the price of the HD upgrade is more than what I could buy a new iPod, but to have my entire music library with me at all times (and on a single Rockbox-modded iPod) is mouth-watering... But enough about that.  Will the current build work with the 240GB HD or will I have to wait for a new release?

[dreamlayers]

I think it works but you'll need a custom build.  See:
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/BigDisk
You must at least define HAVE_LBA48.  I guess you don't need HAVE_MULTIVOLUME because the code in flash supports LBA48, but I don't know if anyone has tested this.  Some software will refuse to create a large FAT32 partition but at least mkfs.vfat on Linux ought to work.

Some disk reads will be slow if the physical sector size is greater than 512 bytes.  This is an issue on the 80G iPod.  I don't know what is the physical sector size on that disk.

[cool_walking_]

Some disk reads will be slow if the physical sector size is greater than 512 bytes.  This is an issue on the 80G iPod.  I don't know what is the physical sector size on that disk.

Bytes/sector
  Host  512
  Disk  4,096

I'm not sure what that means...

[dreamlayers]

Some disk reads will be slow if the physical sector size is greater than 512 bytes.  This is an issue on the 80G iPod.  I don't know what is the physical sector size on that disk.

Bytes/sector
  Host  512
  Disk  4,096

I'm not sure what that means...

Yes, that's the issue I was talking about.  For compatibility reasons ATA devices need to pretend they have 512 byte sectors.  Sometimes sectors are larger.  Software can ignore that fact, but that hurts performance.  For more info see http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=19964

Setting MAX_PHYS_SECTOR_SIZE to 4096 might help, but I am not sure. 

[rmaniac]

It works btw. Need to set the sectors to 4048 and lba48.. don't try the USB stack with anything earlier than 20208 (from today) and if you want to have more than 32768 file you will need to pull the patch I posted to fly spray. You will have to custom build the boot loader and rockbox itself to make it all work.

[cool_walking_]

Cool, I just ordered one.

[rmaniac]

Little update.. the over 32768 patch was committed to SVN this morning.

[cool_walking_]

set the sectors to 4048

I assume that's a typo, and you meant 4096.

[soap]

The offered build for these monster drives has been moved to  Unsupported Builds.

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=20960.0