iAudio X5L and 240GB MK2431GAH

[sixthofmay]

Hot off the press and it'll take a few days for me to fill the drive and test...





As you can see I discovered the hard way that the zif connector does not flip open... I  broke part of the connector off.... the contacts are strong and springy, and it's a snug fit so I hope it won't be a problem. I'll put in the adapter spacer and use a bit of epoxy to add strength, and cover the area with electrical tape like I did on my X5 80GB upgrade.

Brief details and I'll do a full writeup if it passes the 137GB barrier without issue:
Cowon iAudio X5L with a 1100mAH battery
Toshiba MK2431GAH 8mm thick and 240GB
Drive extracted from a A18-USB-240 ordered last week from Newegg (you'll need a security torx bit to turn the case screws).
libmart.co.kr AN-ZIF219 zif to micro ata adapter
Rockbox built with the VMWare development image running on the free VMWare 1.09 server.
Rockbox and bootloader compiled from the trunk r25280.
Write speed from the PC to X5 over USB is about 6MB/sec.
The drive is 4096 bytes/sector but doesn't need #define MAX_PHYS_SECTOR_SIZE 4096.
I only added #define HAVE_LBA48 in ../firmware/export/config/iaudiox5.h

[gevaerts]

Have a look at http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/UDMAonUSB to help with speed. It might help (or not...)

[pwhodges]

See also my discovery of how to speed up the even slower USB writes to this disk via an iriver H340 - in a thread near here :-)

[sixthofmay]

Thanks for the speed tips! I checked with that utility and it's running at UDMA4, but that wasn't the issue. I forgot that when copying from my music server over my gige network to a USB drive, transfers go slow for some reason... Copying from a local drive, I timed about 70 seconds for a 1400MB file, or 20MB/sec.

I took some more pics and closed it up and have copied about 160GB of music to it now, mostly flacs and preliminary tests are good. No problems listening to the last folders copied over. I'll take it to work the rest of this week and see how it goes.

Here's chkdsk output (win XP):
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume AEGIS MINI created 9/15/2009 3:46 PM
Volume Serial Number is 239D-42BC
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
  234,371,232 KB total disk space.
       23,840 KB in 743 folders.
  166,434,304 KB in 9,114 files.
   67,913,056 KB are available.

       32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
    7,324,101 total allocation units on disk.
    2,122,283 allocation units available on disk.

[kvnknrd]

question will this work in a 5.5 80gb ipod with a 32mb motherboard??

[torne]

Any hard drive which physically fits and has the right connector should now work, but you will need to manually install the test version of the bootloader from the official test builds forum, as the current released bootloader doesn't support large drives.

[kvnknrd]

Ok sounds good. I have a thread up in here right now about a potentially bricked ipod and I found those 240gb usb drives for like 175 shipped.. not such a bad deal after pricing it around.. just have to weigh out whether I actually need that much space or not. Plus if it fails on me in a couple years due to the poor housing of a 5.5 gen ipod I'll be pretty miffed.

[Nick H.]

What's the best way to acquire this drive? Walmart has the Apricorn for $199: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Apricorn-A18-USB-240-Aegis-Mini-240GB-4200-RPM-2MB-Cache-USB-2.0-External-Hard-Drive/11017038?sourceid=1500000000000003142050&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=11017038

[Jennifur]

Thanks for the speed tips! I checked with that utility and it's running at UDMA4, but that wasn't the issue. I forgot that when copying from my music server over my gige network to a USB drive, transfers go slow for some reason... Copying from a local drive, I timed about 70 seconds for a 1400MB file, or 20MB/sec.

I took some more pics and closed it up and have copied about 160GB of music to it now, mostly flacs and preliminary tests are good. No problems listening to the last folders copied over. I'll take it to work the rest of this week and see how it goes.

Here's chkdsk output (win XP):
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume AEGIS MINI created 9/15/2009 3:46 PM
Volume Serial Number is 239D-42BC
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
  234,371,232 KB total disk space.
       23,840 KB in 743 folders.
  166,434,304 KB in 9,114 files.
   67,913,056 KB are available.

       32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
    7,324,101 total allocation units on disk.
    2,122,283 allocation units available on disk.

It is going slower over the network than from a local drive because network transfers are almost always slower. Fast ethernet is 100 megabit a second which is roughly 10 megabytes a second. Wifi-N can be a bit quicker. The max for it is 300 megabit a second which is roughly 30 megabyte a second. You also have it copying from the network share, to a temporary folder on the computer's hard drive, then to your player.

[Nick H.]

I have a 30GB X5L and would love to do this upgrade, but I'm not clever enough. Any chance of one of you brainiacs writing an idiot's guide?

[TexasRockbox]

Have upgraded a Cowon X5L with the Toshiba MK2431GAH 240GB drive and the Libmart AN-ZIF219.  Rockbox 3.7.1 installed.  Both batteries are still being used.  The back cover isn't fully closed.  Found some slightly longer screws that allow for the original back to be secured (don't over tighten!).  Will have to engineer a black gasket that will fit around the gap.

When 256GB 1.8" SSD ZIF drives are less expensive (costing about $600USD as of writing) I should be able to attach the drive without need of a gasket (SSD are 5mm thick).

Great looking player, great sound, built in FM, high capacity and long battery life.