Solid State Drives to work with Rockbox?

[Davide-NYC]

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20070109VL203.html

This looks to be real and a boon to all of us. Will there be compatibility issues?

32GB solid state 1.8" HDs.... Yummy.

[Llorean]

Since they're designed to be interchangeable with classic HDs, probably not.

[michael.conner]

I hope the announce pricing on the 32GB ones.  The 16GB 1.8" ones are supposed to retail for US $169... perhaps $250-300 for the 32GB ones?  Having a 32GB flash-based Rockboxed H1x0 (an H132, natch) would be an amazing piece o' kit...

[Llorean]

I agree. I'm holding out for the 64, I don't care what the price ends up being. While 32gb is conceivably fillable for me, 64 really isn't. At that point, I may even consider the USB charge mod.

[bk]

They are indeed nice, but given the great performance numbers and high price it'd be a bit of a waste right now to put them in a DAP. I'd probably keep it for a subnotebook.

Once the production volume goes up I think portable HDDs will become a thing of the past.

[saratoga]

Imagine the battery life with one of those.  

[redwood]

Oooh....man put these in any rockboxable unit that has an internal mic and the possibility for news organizations (such as the one I work at) would be fantastic - no more HDD whine on internal mic record, fantastic battery life.....

[Sparky]

I've contacted Sandisk, who provided me with information and pricing details on this product.

Being a drop-in replacement for 1.8" drives, it would work with the iPod (or other devices with 1.8" harddrives), although the depth (height) of the drive with its metal casing is 8mm. The 30GB iPod has a 5mm depth harddrive. This means that the larger case (for the 60/80GB model) would have to be used, or the metal case to be taken off the SSD. Doing the latter would void the warranty for the SSD.

The price for a single SSD would be around $1500 (about £760). It would begin to look extremely interesting with a 64GB SSD that would fit perfectly into an iPod. If I can remember, other companies are developing 1.8" SSDs with a capacity of 64GB (nothing on price yet though).

[michael.conner]

I wonder if that would be a problem with an iRiver H120 and a high-capacity battery... I've got a 2200mAh battery in it, which is a bit thicker than the stock battery, so it's already a slightly tighter fit than normally.

[piquadrat]

AFAIK, these discs need a special file system that prevents extensive write operations to single sectors. For instance, the file access table from a FAT32 partition is read and written very often, which would destroy the associated sectors on the SSD pretty fast. So SSDs aren't just drop-in replacements for regular hard drives, rockbox first needs to support such a file system (like JFFS) to prevent premature disc failures.

[soap]

AFAIK, these discs need a special file system that prevents extensive write operations to single sectors.

On all modern flash chips cards/drives write-averaging is taken care of by the controller, transparent to the end-user, regardless of what filesystem is used.

Not to mention the MTBF for said drive is 2,000,000 hours, vs 300,000 for a standard 1.8" HD.

[fjf]

This is getting interesting:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5645
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36841

[saratoga]

For instance, the file access table from a FAT32 partition is read and written very often, which would destroy the associated sectors on the SSD pretty fast.

Have you considered that the many flash based mp3 players use fat without issue?  Ipod Nano, Sansa, etc.  AFAIK wear leveling has been a standard feature in most flash modules for a while now, so explicit software support for it is unnecessary.  

[Jakeworld]

So would this feasibly be able to be applied? I think this would be an excellent modification, but would something like an iPod natively support such a modification, or would additional code be required in order to simply run the device? This would indeed be an awesome change if it is indeed possible.

[xlarge]

It will work.
They will be drop in replacements for the old harddrives.