Using rockbox with a desktop 3.5" HDD

[larry_llama]

I am wondering about the best disk settings for using rockbox on an iriver with an externally powered 3.5" disk drive. I'm making a 200GB ghetto blaster. The problem I'm having is that it takes a really long time to spin up the drive (compared to the 1.8" drives), so if you skip to a track that has not been bufferred there is a good 5 or 10 second wait time. Unfortunately there is no option for "no spindown", the max being 255 seconds. I have also had occasional troubles with rockbox freezing. I'm still trying to work those out, and I fear it might be related to the homemade ide cable, however I am also suspicious that it's freezing when it unsuccessfully tries to spin up the drive in order to refill the playback buffer. Perhaps if the drive doesn't respond fast enough, rockbox gets confused. I am sure all of the timing settings are based on the assumption that you are using at most a 2.5" drive and even those are significantly faster to spin up than the heavier multiplatter desktop drives.

I am going to keep trying at it, but was wondering if anyone has suggestions for the settings, and also possibly where in the code I can manually make an edit so that there is no spindown. I plan to recompile the sources anyway because I need to use the multidisk function in order to utilize the upper 60 gigs or so.

Thanks!

[jonney]

I have the same problem with a 320GB 3,5" HDD attached to a ipod 4gen grayscale. Everything is working fine with the current version compiled with the bigdisk options.

However the hard drive takes some time to spin up and this causes freezing of the system sometimes when the buffer has to be refilled.

I also get errors when I try to start plugins from the application menu, because the disk starts up too late. If I then try a second time when the disk is already spinning it works fine.

I really would like to be able to set the time the software is waiting for the disk to spin up a little longer.
Is this possible somehow?

Thanx a lot

jonas

[JdGordon]

you can disable the disk spindown pretty easily... you might have to build a custom build to do it though.

[AlexP]

You can't disable without rebuilding, but you can certainly make the spindown longer.  As so often, the manual has the secret:

http://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/rockbox-ipod4g/rockbox-buildch8.html#x11-1430008.5.3

[jonney]

Of course i can make the spin down longer, but I don't have problems with the spinning down time. The problem is that the software freezes or reports an error before the HDD has spun up again.

The only solution would then be to set the HDD never to spin down.

Assume the HD is not spinning. The buffer gets empty so it has to spin up to refill the buffer. But before the HD starts to spin again Rockbox is already freezing or reporting an error that the file can not be accessed.

thank you
 

[torne]

Wouldn't it be better to increase the timeout for waiting for the disk to spin up (and also increase the anti-skip buffer length such that it tries to rebuffer sooner to compensate)?

ata_power_on() in firmware/drivers/ata.c waits for 250ms after turning on the power to send setup commands (which may be ok, it depends if the disk will respond to commands while the platters are still spinning up), and wait_for_bsy() and wait_for_rdy() have timeouts of 30 seconds and 10 seconds respectively. The error reported should generally tell you which timeout or error case you are hitting; adjusting the ATA driver shouldn't be very difficult.

[jonney]

I have experimented with the settings in the firmware/drivers/ata.c a bit. Finally changing the ata_power_on() waiting time from 250ms to 500ms does the trick. I have not made very long testing so far, but it seems to work fine.

Thank you so much for help getting my 320GB Ipod working!

jonas