Third Party > Repairing and Upgrading Rockbox Capable Players

Will 160GB HDD (MK1634GAL) work in H10?

(1/2) > >>

p.h.:
I am considering replacing Toshiba MK6008GAH (60GB) with MK1634GAL (160GB).

Do you know if the MK1634GAL does work with H10?

[Saint]:
If I remember rightly, the 60GB drive you have is a single platter, 5mm model. The 160GB is a dual platter, 8mm model. 3mm may not sound like a lot of difference, but it might just be the deciding factor as to whether or not you'll be able to fit it into the enclosure or not (for example, the iPod 5G Video needs a "fat" backplate to accommodate the larger capacity drives).

I would definitely do some research to see if anyone else has achieved this modification, and how, before committing to purchasing the drive. But there are other options available, however, they can be much more expensive. For example, you could use an adapter and a Compact Flash card, or even an adapter and an mSATA SSD, but both of those options require the same forethought regarding space constraints also.

Good luck, let us know how you get on, and please do post regarding your decisions and process if you are successful.


[Saint]

p.h.:
The 60GB MK6008GAH is 2 platter, 8mm model. Original Hitachi was 7mm thick. The 1mm difference resulted in very tight fit and high tension.

The 160GB MK1634GAL is 1 platter 5mm model (a few mm shorter too). The problem may be it has 4kB sector size http://www.semicon.toshiba.co.jp/product/storage/pdf/hdd18_34.pdf.

As far as I know I would have to use custom bootloader. Futhermore it could turn out not to be enough. According to Rockbox Hard Drive Replacement: "Drives with Large Physical Sectors that do not support unaligned reads and unaligned writes transparently in the drive firmware may not work in certain devices." http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/HardDriveReplacement

So at the moment I know that I do not know:
- if there is appropriate bootloader for H10 and if so where to look for it,
- whether or not MK1634GAL supports unaligned R/W.
Any help on the matter would be appreciated.

This post is my attempt to do some research before buying the HDD. I thought someone could have done this before me and may share some valuable findings.
As to the CF and mSATA mods - they are way too expensive. Both would be tempting if only priced favorably. Not yet.
--
p.h.

p.h.:
After a long time of wondering and lingering to buy any bigger drive I have forgotten, that buying the MK1634GAL could be risky, and so I have bought it.
The drive works just fine :D, although it seems it is a bit slower than the MK6008GAH was, despite the fact MK1634GAL itself is much faster than MK6008GAH.

MK1634GAL is faster than USB2.0 allows, i.e. >30MB/s (read speed tested using USB case). Knowing this it's a real pity, that DMA patch was abandoned. (It was working, hugely improved transfer rates, but it had a bug, which render it unstable)

Having so big drive I have tried to create 2 partitions - the 1st for the music and the 2nd for large file storage, like movies etc. Unluckily NTFS, exFAT and EXT3 2nd partitions were not normally accessible in Windows 7. They were seen as raw space. Only disc image creating tools, like Acronis True Image could read files on the 2nd partition.

dreamlayers:

--- Quote from: p.h. on April 23, 2015, 05:32:48 PM ---The drive works just fine :D, although it seems it is a bit slower than the MK6008GAH was, despite the fact MK1634GAL itself is much faster than MK6008GAH.

MK1634GAL is faster than USB2.0 allows, i.e. >30MB/s (read speed tested using USB case). Knowing this it's a real pity, that DMA patch was abandoned. (It was working, hugely improved transfer rates, but it had a bug, which render it unstable)

--- End quote ---

The PP502x DMA patch is now being used on most PP502x targets. In firmware/export/config/iriverh10.h I see "#define HAVE_ATA_DMA", which should enable it. UDMA 4 is the maximum supported but I believe UDMA 2 is used because higher speeds require boosting. You could try editing firmware/target/arm/pp/ata-target.h to enable UDMA 4. It should automatically cause boosting when needed and work.

The problem that was preventing DMA in the past was an error in the PP502x cache, which was causing data corruption. There is a workaround for that in place now.

Did you align your partitions on a 4k boundary (multiples of 8 in terms of 512 byte sectors)? I'm using HS12YHA in my 5G iPod. I aligned partitions manually in fdisk, and performance doesn't seem significantly worse than MK3008GAL.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page