Gigabeat F hard-drive specifications?

[GigaBrick]

I've been browsing threads mentioning the Gigabeat F40.  I really love mine, got it sometime back in 2006 or something and it's still holding up, but since then my music collection has outgrown the 40 GB capacity.  Oh sure it's easy to pick what I want, but I miss the days of being able to store the entire thing on it.

I caught some mention of people upgrading the hard-drives to 80 Gb capacities.  I'm assuming they just bought a hard-drive of the same specifications that's in the player?

Is it just a normal 2.5" PATA?  SATA?  SCSI?


Anyway, I searched for "how to upgrade gigabeat harddrive" but found nothing, perhaps there's a tutorial floating around?  I've seen similar ones for upgrading the battery...

[saratoga]

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/HardDriveReplacement

[GigaBrick]

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/HardDriveReplacement

Thank you, just what I was looking for.  Now it seems the challenge will be actually finding one of these 1.8" drives...

[sammydad1]

Ebay has had them in the past....but they aren't cheap....as compared to buying a new flash based player...

[GigaBrick]

Ebay has had them in the past....but they aren't cheap....as compared to buying a new flash based player...

Yeah, the cheapest I was finding them for was about $50.

Question about the flash-based players...  Wouldn't they just have lower capacity than I have now?  I'm not aware how much flash-based memory has improved, but I thought 32 GB was about the biggest you find.

I really like my Gigabeat though so I think I'll probably just choose to upgrade that anyway.

[thenrik]

Hi:

  I'm also a big fan of the Gigabeat. I have two that I still use and many of my friends have them as well. That being said, as time goes by the hard drives are not holding up so well. I bought a 80gb Gigabeat and six months later the hard drive failed. I've recently seen also seen three other Gigabeats owned by my friends fail.

  Gigabeats are scarce, selling for $169 on Ebay. I'm looking to use the Sansa Fuse with Rockbox as replacements. 16gb micro sd  cards are fairly cheap and can be swapped in and out. Hard drive systems fail over time.

Tom

[GigaBrick]

Hi:

  I'm also a big fan of the Gigabeat. I have two that I still use and many of my friends have them as well. That being said, as time goes by the hard drives are not holding up so well. I bought a 80gb Gigabeat and six months later the hard drive failed. I've recently seen also seen three other Gigabeats owned by my friends fail.

  Gigabeats are scarce, selling for $169 on Ebay. I'm looking to use the Sansa Fuse with Rockbox as replacements. 16gb micro sd  cards are fairly cheap and can be swapped in and out. Hard drive systems fail over time.

Tom

Yeah, the prospect of a mechanical drive has occurred to me, but I'm mostly not very worried about disk failure because I've had this one since 2005-2006 and the drive is holding up nicely from what I can tell.  I probably don't really use mine as much as the average DAP user though.  The thought of buying a newer player has crossed my mind, but this one is still working so well.  Actually pretty cool considering it's been 5-6 years, but as I said I probably don't listen to mine as much as the average DAP user does.  Maybe two or three times a week for a couple of hours.

[bob2935]

I am in a similar situation.  About 3 years ago, the good people here recommended the Gigabeat for me, a totally blind Rockbox user looking for a dedicated Ogg Vorbis player with speech capability.  I found an F40 on Ebay and it's been perfect.  However, it's falling apart and 40 gig capacity is no longer enough.  Before I switch to something like an 80 gig IPod Video with that stupid wheel, does anyone have any better recommendations?  I don't feel comfortable trying to upgrade the harddrive in my existing player.  I'd rather pay somebody else to do it right.
Bob.