Gigabeat F60: Replacing Hard Drive

[Master_Frag]

My Gigabeat has a failing HDD, and I'm looking into possible upgrades to replace it with.

I know this should be a fairly simple procedure, however, I have come here to ask if it's possible to replace the dying hard drive with either an SSD, or a USB flash drive (which I know is a somewhat silly idea), preferably of a larger size than is currently in the device.

I would like to politely ask for suggestions as to how to proceed, and my possible replacement options, if it isn't possible to use the SSD or USB solution, what HDDs are good, fairly reliable upgrades from the stock 60GB drive, looking at a minimum of 100GB.

[gevaerts]

Forget USB, but a compactflash card (with an adapter) should be possible

[Master_Frag]

Forget USB, but a compactflash card (with an adapter) should be possible

I thought about that, given that it's easy and the parts are very readily available, but the cost of 128GB and above CF cards is a bit much for me, though I will fall back to that idea if it's the best solution.
I was thinking about the possibility of using SDHC cards, do you know if that would be plausible?

[Serenity]

I dropped one of these into my iRiver H320 a month ago:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007PF15VG/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It is a little pricey, but it's a great replacement (and will fit your Gigabeat).  I had to use an external enclosure and reformat it (I used Ubuntu's disk utility) to FAT32 and repartition it, but that didn't take long. From there, I just copied the contents of the old drive over.

I have tried SD and CF adapters in the past, but never had any luck getting the player to recognise it.  This is the first upgrade that was easy enough for me to tackle!

[Master_Frag]

I dropped one of these into my iRiver H320 a month ago:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007PF15VG/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It is a little pricey, but it's a great replacement (and will fit your Gigabeat).  I had to use an external enclosure and reformat it (I used Ubuntu's disk utility) to FAT32 and repartition it, but that didn't take long. From there, I just copied the contents of the old drive over.

I have tried SD and CF adapters in the past, but never had any luck getting the player to recognise it.  This is the first upgrade that was easy enough for me to tackle!

It's a bit more than I was looking to pay, however, a 64GB version would probably be enough, especially considering that it would gain quite a lot of power savings from running an SSD.
Thanks for the suggestion.

I'd still prefer the ability to use SD cards though, because I could easily mod the player to swap them quickly, assuming rockbox allows hot-swapping, but I'm not sure on that count.

[Serenity]

That's a cool idea, actually. I don't know that there's a way to unmount storage from within Rockbox unless you power off the player.  It would be weird to see a Gigabeat with an SD card slot! I'm intrigued!

[Master_Frag]

Given that I go through 60GB in an instant, being able to pop out one card one one genre of music, and pop another one in would be very nice.

Though I did just have an annoying thought, I'd have to mirror rockbox on all of the cards, and synch all the files between the installations, which could be moderately problematic.
An SSD would be the easy solution, but not the ideal for me, but either is better than using an HDD, since it'll lighten the load on the battery, be faster, and I don't really have to worry about the drive dying as much.