upgrade my gigabeat F's hd

[psycho_maniac]

so, i have a gigabeat F with a 80gb hd in it, but the hd is so slow and i have over 13k songs on it. Has anybody upgraded the Gigabeat F to flash memory? I have some questions
1. would it be hard?
2. would it make my mp3 player run faster?
3. would i have to modify the build to run rockbox?

[LambdaCalculus]

1) The hardest part would perhaps be finding a solid state drive or flash memory with higher capacity than your current hard drive, and in the right form factor. You could always get a drive with a ZIF connector (ribbon instead of pins) and an adapter.

2) Having flash storage means that you don't have to wait for drive spinups, so files will be read faster. This depends on the speed of the flash, though.

3) No. Rockbox should work with no modifications.

[psycho_maniac]

thanks for the info. i kinda assumed id go lower in memory going to flash memory. or ssd. the drives are pretty expensive aren't they?

[LambdaCalculus]

Yes, SSDs tend to be quite expensive. The other alternative you can do is buy a CompactFlash card, a CF-to-ATA adapter, and replace the drive with that instead.

As a rule of thumb, I would go for a CF card that offers at least 133x read/write speed.