iPod Mini 2G battery life is reeeeeally bad (only 25% of stock firmware!)

[saratoga]

Has anyone tested stock Mini 2G hardware recently?  The benchmarks on the wiki are more than a decade old and predate a lot of the power management improvements.  It would be interesting to know if there is some general regression.

[eicca]

Other than my last tests, posted in this thread, I haven't done anything official.

It would seem RockBox doesn't play nice with the Tarkan CF-SD adaptor. In the "disk info" section of debug, all "power management" entries show "unsupported." That probably has something to do with it.

I grabbed a few old CF cards to run tests with but apparently they were all bad and kept throwing errors during setup.

[saratoga]

It would seem RockBox doesn't play nice with the Tarkan CF-SD adaptor. In the "disk info" section of debug, all "power management" entries show "unsupported." That probably has something to do with it.

That is actually what you were testing on the last page of this thread.  The issue is that those adapters don't actually support a lot of the power management stuff in the ata spec, so if you try to use it they crash or corrupt data.

[eicca]

Crap, so am I still looking at shelling out big bucks for a high-capacity CF card?

Or is there a known-working CF-SD adapter that'll play nice with the power management?

[eicca]

Rockbox 4.0 appears to have solved this and solved it big.

Before using 4.0, I could never get my iPod Mini 2G with CF-SD adapter and 256GB card to burn less than 12-15% of battery per hour, resulting in a max of 7 hours playback.

I've been letting it play all morning and now it's only using 3-4% per hour. On track for at least 24 hours of playback, an improvement of over 3x.

This is HUGE and I think needs more recognition than just a bullet point in the release notes.

Good job and major thanks, Rockbox devs.