Archos Jukebox - big HD (200gb or more?), SATA via adapter?, power questions

[pandora]

I tried searching the forums but apparently this one doesn't come up all that often/with other posts being years old i'm wondering whether anything new has been discovered, changed, or whatever. 


I picked up an Archos Jukebox I know nothing about that has sat on the shelf until I found possible cheap hard drives to go with it.  Planned to Rockbox it since the beginning.  Discovered the cheap HD's I picked up were SATA forgetting that the Archos was probably an IDE.  :^)  According to old posts and the wiki it should read up to a 160gb drive, but has anyone tried anything larger?  Is it 'theoretically workable' (and up to what size) to run 200gb or more, or is there some other limit making 160gb the largest option?

Does anyone know of an IDE-to-SATA converter that might fit or/and whether it should work?  My available used drives are currently SATA.  If no go i'll just shop for an IDE drive next time.


Finally, i'm sure it's described somewhere on the wiki but honestly some of those pages are confusing, and i'm not sure where else to find users of a player this old to ask... so maybe someone else who is a user could tell me straight up...  what are the different powering options for this old unit?  Can I just plug it into a USB car charger to power it on the go like a phone?  (is that enough to keep up with battery drain)  Are there dedicated 12vdc adapters to not use batteries?  Will powering off USB charge NIMH AA's in the unit like it does with a phone?  Is there anything like a battery upgrade for the unit?

Those might all be modern conveniences and this player too old for any of that, but i'm new to the player and have no idea.

[micksharpe]

I am still using my Archos Jukebox Recorder 20GB. It is possible to install higher-capacity hard disks although there are some gotchas. This wiki page http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/BigDisk explains the issues pretty well. If you want to play safe, don't go above 137GB (128GiB). Note that the Archos bootloader expects the first partition on the drive to be FAT32 and the maximum size of a FAT32 partition is 32GB with the standard block size.

The Archos players/recorders are not USB-powered, so you will need a power adapter for extended use. My unit came with a 9V 600mA adapter so you will need something similar if you want to run it off your car battery. There should be no problems charging it and using it at the same time.

When the 20GB hard disk in my unit started to fail, I chose to replace it with a 32GB SDHC memory card and IDE adapter. I can provide more details if you are interested. Another option is an IDE mSATA adapter.