H320 Drive replacement - whats the best 8gig cf card to use?

[Neilyboy]

I have been looking around and read through the wiki on making this switch. I recently purchased a used iriver h320 from taperssection which supposedly only had a bad battery. Well now after getting the battery replaced anything I record onto the drive is corrupted and gives me crc errors when trying to copy it over to the pc (so im assuming it is a dead drive). I have already purchased the adapter needed to preform this mod.

I am looking around trying to find the cheapest way out actually.. I have already sunk more money in this thing that I had originally planned. I was planning on running this as my rig to record from the soundboard to matrix with my aud/mic source for a few different bands.

So im trying to keep this cheap and was looking for the cheapest 8gig solution out there. I see that amazon has the a-data 8gig cf card for 20 bucks..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211259

or the transcend for $24

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208340

are either of these workable? If not any suggestions?

Thanks so much in advance.

Neil

[peteswensson]

I have had success with the 8 GB Transcend 133X in my H320.  It has worked perfectly - no problems of any kind. 

I also have used the 32 GB Transcend 133X in it.  At first the 32 GB Transcend was finicky, sometimes freezing up.  I gave up on it and got a 32 GB RiData 233X card, which has worked perfectly so far.  Then this last weekend I tried again to get the Transcend 32 GB card to work.  I reformatted it and loaded the 2008-12-23 version of Release 3.1 (I had been using a version from last summer).  Now it seems to be working, so maybe I had gotten a file corrupted on the card.

Bottom line, I can vouch for the 8 GB Transcend 133X. 

Take note of the speed of the cards you consider.  Any are fast enough to record audio to, but the faster the card is, the quicker it will upload or download files to and from it.  The A-Data Speedy is not as fast as the Transcend 133x; I recall it clocks in at about 40X.  Others on this website have had good success with the A-Data Speedy CF card series, so it seems a good bet.

Also take note that you will have to have a functioning hard drive for the H320 to flash the CF-mod bootloader from the wiki page here.  It cannot read the CF card until you have flashed the modified bootloader to it first.  You have to do that from its hard drive, but you say that anything you record onto the drive is corrupted.  If it were me, I would be cautious about using a possibly corrupted hard drive to flash the bootloader, because if it doesn't work, you could brick your H320.  You can find replacement Toshiba MK2004gal drives on eBay for about $25-30.  Avoid the ones with the Apple logo on them, since some people have found them incompatible with iRivers.  Apple apparently modifies them in some manner.

Good luck!  I've been pleased with my CF-modded iRivers.

[Matze88]

I do not think that a harddrive with errors could brick your player. The hex file should contain some kind of CRC and should only be programmed if it was read to the players ram correctly. But I wont take any warranty :-)

[scharkalvin]

There have recently been some generic OEM flash cards for sale on E-Bay with no-name blue labels.  These are supposed to have been built with Samsung memory parts.  They are available in 8, 16 and 32 GB sizes.  Reports on the 'net are that they work fine with iPods (both the mini, and with an adapter will replace the 1.8" HD in larger iPods too.)  I am currently using the 32GB size with an adapter in a Gigabeat F10, and it works great.  They are 150X in speed and are usually cheaper than the A-Data brand.  I had no luck with an A-Data 16GB card in my Gigabeat, maybe the Gigabeat needs a faster card than the iPods do.