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SSD iPod Video (5.5G) battery runtime issues

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jbills:
Heya!  I love Rockbox+iPod, so much that I finally went ahead and converted my 80gb 5.5 over to a 256gb SSD.  Perfection.  Went ahead and replaced the battery while in there.  Friend helped me out and gave me a version of rockbox 3.14 that apparently had udma support for the ssd I was using (he had done the same mod and figured that part out).

Everything is working, but my battery life is terrible.  With this setup, I'm getting 8 hours runtime after 3 power cycles, only dropping to 59% before cutting out.  Which is about the runtime I was getting before with the previous (stock) drive and old battery. 

It also acts SUPER flakey at the end of the power band.  As it winds down, it dies and goes into a boot loop where it endlessly cycles on the apple logo (both rockbox and orig firmware) and won't charge up without me first jumping into the service mode and specifically telling it to power > sleep > forever.  If I can get there fast enough before it dies.  Only when I finally get it to manually shut down like that will it then charge up enough to get past the boot loop.

For comparison, I also have an old 30gb iPod 5.5 that I did the iFlash mod to (I use it as a recorder for work) w/ a 128gb SD card, and it gets almost 20 hours runtime.   That's closer to what I was expecting.

The battery I ordered was one of the 850ah ones from amazon that had the best rating (upstart?), so I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt.  Does an iPod battery just take a couple weeks to get back up to full capacity after a fresh install?  Maybe it just needs to wake up still?  The first cycle only gave me 6 hours!  So it does seem to be improving, but 20 seems like a long shot.

I'm pretty close to doing an exchange on the battery, but thought I'd hit the boards first.    Are there any config settings you all are using with an SSD that I might need to make to improve things?  Any step by step when first updating to an ssd to make rockbox...  rock?  I didn't have these issues with the iflash adapter one, nor did I have to use a specific "fixed" rockbox to get it to recognize the drive.  So I'm in new territory.  Not seeing anything like this on the boards previously.

thx in advance.

jbills:
also of note - it seems to want to commit the database when starting up every time.  for a really long time, sometimes 30+ minutes.  Or maybe it's still boot looping and i'm just noticing it because I left and came back 30 mins later.

Drive seems fine otherwise - I dumped on 200gb of music and then ran the database when I first put the ssd in, just seems like it never completed whatever database ops it does even though it's been fully charged and drained a couple times since then.

saratoga:
Either bad battery or a problem with the SSD. Put the old storage back in and see if the problem goes away.

jbills:
Thanks for the idea, but I don't suspect it's the drive enough to yank it out again (lot of effort).  Pretty sure it's the battery.  Gotta be. Drive took 200gb of music like a champ with no hiccups.

I suppose I could run the longer chkdsk on it, see if that turns up any bad sectors.  That's about the only thing I can think of.

I'll poke around the forums and see if I can find out if there's a more reliable battery than this "Upstart" one I ordered off of Amazon.  It seemed recommended enough but maybe I got a dud.

cereal_killer:
Is it an mSATA SSD? This is known to cause short runtime.

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