IPOD (ALL MODELS) iFlash Adapter Issues [SOLVED]

[Cle]

Good day everyone. I just bought an ipod classic 7th gen with an iflash quad 512gb. May i know if th3 rockbox is already stable on this kind of mod? Thank you in advance for th3 answers

[philden]

Yes, it runs very well.

[tieflyer]

Well I am not sure if this is a iFlash adapter issue or just how I handle the ipod.  I have a classic 5th gen with iFlash solo with 256gb card.  When i let the battery go to the point that the ipod shuts off, and then recharge it, i start it back up, but it starts in the ipod firmware instead of rockbox.   I have found if i reinstall the bootloader it then boots to rockbox.  Has anyone found a work around for this issue?  Not sure what buttons i hit when i reboot, but I believe the hold slider is off and i may or may not have bumped the play/pause button before pressing the menu button.  I have the latest daily build as of 7/6/2023 on the unit as I added music yesterday and it rebooted in the ipod screen instead of rockbox. 

Love this firmware and i want to continue using it, however i do not want to have to reinstall the bootloader everytime i recharge or add music.

Thank in advance for any help you can provide!

[tieflyer]

well I think i may have found a reply to my question, i am going to try making sure the hold button is not on when i disconnect from the pc and or finish charging. 

[tieflyer]

Has anyone used a Samsung    EVO Select (Blue) UHS-I (U3) A2 V30 128gb card with iflash SD-CF Adapter in an ipod mini 2nd gen successfully?  I know the 256 and 512 are supposed to be compatable, but I think that the mini will only go up to 128, and I think that is plenty of space for the songs/albums I have. 

Thanks for your help and keep up this great product!!!

[woodensoul]

I have an iPod Mini 1G with a 512GB SD card and iFlash adapter.  Rockbox seems to work well except the battery life (with a brand new battery) is atrocious. Maybe 1.5 hours. I am running the daily build 230914.  Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this?

[saratoga]

^^ Open it up and see what part is getting hot?

[woodensoul]

I noticed the back felt warm after transferring a lot of files with the OF and then playing them in Rockbox.  I would have to check if it gets warm during normal playback in Rockbox. I can say that battery run time in the OF seems normal.  Testing right now and at 2.5 hours and 60% full battery.

The battery run time in Rockbox was much better with the spinning hard drive before I converted to SD.

My assumption is the iFlash adapter is getting warm based on how the back of the case seems to be acting like a heat sink.

[speachy]

... are you using an actual iFlash board, or is it a generic knockoff?

What you're reporting is unusual; the mSATA-based flash adapters are known to be very power hungry but the SD-based ones should, if anything, lead to improved battery times.

That said, rockbox actually disables some of the ATA power management stuff because it's known to lead to data corruption on the the iFlash SD adapters -- the tl;dr is that they don't properly handling the ATA power management commands, leading to massive data corruption if we try to tell the device to go into a state where it's safe to kill power (and then kill power a couple of seconds after we're told it's ok to do so)

[woodensoul]

On my iPod Mini 1G: I started out with the generic one but that was completely unreliable so I switched to an actual iFlash branded adapter.  Now it is reliable but terrible with battery life.

I am seeing the same issue on an iPod photo using the same iFlash adapter / generic green 50 pin to CF converter board.

[rockbox_dev123]

I finally decided to revisit using an SD card in an iPod.

I have:
- iPod 5.5th gen (aka ipodvideo 80GB with 64 MB of RAM).
- The latest hardware revision of the iFlash Solo.
- SanDisk Extreme PRO UHS-I Card - 512GB (SKU: SDSDXXD-512G-GN4IN) (ordered directly from Western Digital to avoid the risk of fakes).

A speed test (writing and reading from /dev/zero with dd) was done using the Apple firmware:
1 GB write = 9.07 MB/s
1 GB read = 12.59 MB/s

Can anyone with the same hardware confirm if they get similar speeds?

The card has the usual bullshit of "200 MB/s" written on it but the "10" on it means that there is only a guaranteed write speed of "10 MB/s". My tests seem to show that it can't achieve this.

[bahus]

The card has the usual bullshit of "200 MB/s" written on it

It's in megabits(should really be marked as Mb/s).  Using SD-reader you should get close to specification speed  (200 Mb/s =  25 MB/s)

[vitt13]

It's in megabits

No, it's actually in megabytes for this specific SanDisk card but it's reading speed, up to 200MB/s. And the writing speed depends on capacity: for 512GB card the writing speed is up to 140MB/s (according to WesternDigital website).
But those speeds are achieved with SDIO 3.0 support on endpoint device.

[amachronic]

Bear in mind no matter what card you put inside the adapter you are limited by the iPod's hardware. The first limitation is the CE-ATA bus to connect the drive, which hardware-wise is identical to an SD/MMC bus. I don't know the details for the iPod, but it will be capped to either 25 MB/sec or 50 MB/sec. The second limitation is USB 2.0 -- the maximum speed you can get is roughly 40 MB/sec.

You can probably blame the rest on software and the USB mass storage protocol. Classic USBMS doesn't support queuing requests, which means either the USB bus or the drive will sit idle for around half the time (and thus you lose half the potential transfer speed - you might top out around 25-30 MB/sec). The newer UASP transfer protocol fixes that issue, but it won't be supported by the iPod's firmware.

I've also found that SD cards require large, contiguous writes to get good speeds, like 512KB - 2MB. USBMS can only transfer up to 120 KB at a time, which won't be anywhere near enough to max out the SD card. The only way to work around this issue is (good) caching in the iPod firmware or the iFlash, or again switching to UASP (which supports larger transfer sizes).

So your speeds look rather typical to me for a USB 2.0 device with a typical less-than-stellar caching implementation.

[speachy]

Bear in mind no matter what card you put inside the adapter you are limited by the iPod's hardware. The first limitation is the CE-ATA bus to connect the drive, which hardware-wise is identical to an SD/MMC bus. I don't know the details for the iPod, but it will be capped to either 25 MB/sec or 50 MB/sec. The second limitation is USB 2.0 -- the maximum speed you can get is roughly 40 MB/sec.

Just to be pedantic, they're using an iPod 5.5, which has a regular parallel ATA interface that (IIRC) maxes out at UDMA66 burst speeds. Then there's the iFlash PATA/CF<->SD adapter which is its own bottleneck (and I don't think goes over UDMA/33). 

So your speeds look rather typical to me for a USB 2.0 device with a typical less-than-stellar caching implementation.

Yeah, those transfer speeds actually better than I'd have expected to see.

Rockbox has a disk performance benchmark that would demonstrate the best we can pull off without the USB interface being a factor.  But at the end of the day the iPod SoC simply isn't designed around rapidly shovelling around large amounts of data.   And neither is Rockbox.

Anyway; the point of using the SD mods isn't raw transfer performance, it's storage capacity (and to a lesser extent, physical robustness and battery life)