Iriver h120 CF mod-> speed advantages over ide-hd ?

[hondo]

Hi!
I would like to do the cf mod on my "new" used H120.
It still has an ide-hd installed.
The access time when for example you listen to song and in the meantime want to go to menu is ridiculously long if you ask me.
Obviously the hd has to spin up first before anything happens.
I bought it used so I have no idea if the drive's spin up was faster originally.

How much will that be improved by the install of a cf card?
Do I have to take a faster cf card than say, 133x?
Or is the delay time with the original hd only due to spin up?
So even a slower cf card with 133x will allow a fast change to a menu when a song is playing?
-> no delay anymore with any CF?

I'm sure I'll have more questions, but for now that's it .

Regards
Hondo

P.S. Since this is a pretty much trivial question, I wasn't gonna ask it here at the tech forum.
BUt unfortunately registering neither works at taperssection (activation link not working) nor at misticriver (no activation link is being sent)...

[LambdaCalculus]

How much will that be improved by the install of a cf card?

Solid-state drives are faster than hard drives, so you will notice a boost in reading and writing files, but see below.

Do I have to take a faster cf card than say, 133x?

Any CompactFlash card that uses UDMA (i.e. can act like a hard drive) works, but the general recommendation is to use a fast CF card. So 133x or better will give you better overall performance.

Or is the delay time with the original hd only due to spin up?

That's part of the reason why.

So even a slower cf card with 133x will allow a fast change to a menu when a song is playing?
-> no delay anymore with any CF?

This is a bit of a speculation. I used a slower CF card (90x) on an iPod mini 2nd gen, and performance was acceptable. Switching it to a 133x CF card improved read/write performance.

On the other hand, my iPod video has the same make and capacity CF card (Transcend 133x 32GB, if you're curious), and I've noticed that while performance is much better than with the old hard drive, the device still "sleeps" like a hard drive would, and does have a small delay to "wake up" when loading music. This, however, does not affect performance in any way.

If you want the best reasons why you should do the mod, here would be three good ones:

1) No moving parts from a hard drive means no risk of damaging it if you accidentally drop your H120,
2) Improved battery life, since CF cards draw much less power than hard drives, and
3) It's fun to do!

[hondo]

He there!

Major downer for me really is that the spin up time of the hd is pretty annoying.
When you listen to a song and want to go to the music folder or anything else in the menu,
the drive has to "wake up", and nothing happens for about 1-2 seconds.
That doesn't sound long, but it feels like infinity when you're used to the responsiveness of
most hardware these days.
Actually I don't mind the read writing speeds, or the general responsiveness too much, it's fine.
It's just so annoying to have to wait for about 2 seconds after you have clicked the button until it changes to the menu...

Another reason for me to do the CF mod would be that it's obviously a little quieter, and i hope the device
will get lighter.
The Iriver h120 is a pretty massive device at 160g.

And of course possibly improved battery life.
Right now it's okay for a used player I guess.
About 11 hours, repeating one album encoded in flac.
Maybe with a CF card I can increase that a bit.

Before I do anything though, I want to start from scratch with the player.
I want to get rid of anything the previous owner did with the device, reset it completely.
Not sure where to start right now, or if it's that even possible with the past changes to
the original firmware, possibly the rom...
Have yet to really look into that and see if I can understand it.

Actually this step could be skipped if it was possible to install rockbox and the bootloader directly to
the CF card.
However my understanding is that that's not possible but that you have to do the iniutial steps (upgrade firmware,pacth, bootloader?) on the ide-hd, even though the drive will be deinstalled later on.

Still not sure which CF card to buy though, I have had a look at some, the one I'd be interested most as of now would be the transcend 32GB 133x, as it's not that expensive (compared to other 32Gb cards that is).
Unfortunately I read in another forum that someone had a problem with exactly that card due to an outdated bootloader and I'm not sure that problem has been solved yet.
I think a guy maned Petur and him had an ongoing dialogue but the issue was never really resolved.

That's another thing with the mod- it started a few years ago, and since then some things can be done differently but sometimes it's not really clear which guides are uptodate, which steps can be done in another way.

Regards
Hondo

[Chronon]

Do you have "Directory Cache" (aka dircache) enabled?  Disk access shouldn't be necessary to use the file browser (or database browser if that's loaded to RAM). 

[hondo]

Thanks a lot!
I wasn't aware of that, for some reason the previous owner had it disabled.
Now the drive only needs to spin up to fill the buffer with music .

Regards
hondo

[sparkletooth]

Heys guys!

First off, thanks for all the wonderful info.  I've been wanting to do the CF Mod for some time after upgrading the battery a couple of years ago.

I'm thinking of buying the Topram 32GB CF card but would like to know if there are better cards for the money out there. My budget is $100.

What I'd really like to know is, are there other (faster) CF cards on sale that work flawlessly with the iRiver H120 apart from those listed on the compatibility list?

Thanks again!