You have PM!

Thanks for your help, eagle!

From the Book of Empeg.

And so it came to pass, a lowly Empeg user didst try to upgrade to dual SSDs
and was thwarted in his efforts.

Knowing the good Lord was keeping watch, the user beseeched Him for His
assistance and benevolence and tolerance.

The Lord did see the users plight and dismay and came down from where he
resided up on high (Canada). And Lo! The Lord hacked the Hijack Kernel to
include a longer wait state for SSD cards and unto the user He thundered,
"Test this special release of my code."

And the user did test the code, uploading song after song all through the long night.
And he was delighted beyond compare as he saw his faithful Empeg once more
restored to working order. And he said unto the Lord, "Thanks, man! You're da bomb."

And the Lord cast his eye over the code once more and saw that it was good.
And all was well again. And the Lord did declare unto all, "Users! There is another
version of Hijack for slow-writing SSDs."

Heh, reminds me of Acts of Gord.

As the lord has now spoken i may now retry my dual CF empeg project.

Muahahaa.

Time for a slight bump

I'm still waiting for affordable 64 GB cards before I move mine to solid state.

Very sexy, Rob!

Colour coordinated and everything!

Yeah, it's beautiful but it isn't working reliably. Very often, the slave drive will fail upon boot with the "lost interrupt" error. I can't tell you how many times I flashed the drive builder on the player last night, but I spent 5-6 hours trying to get thing working right.

It doesn't matter which adapter I designate slave or which card I stick into which adapter. 9 times out of 10, the thing won't boot correctly and HDB is always what gets hung-up. I checked the cable multiple times and even swapped for a new one.

My list of possible reasons is:

• The CF cards may not be 100% compatible being accessed as IDE devices (probably a long shot).
• The IDE-to-CF adapters may not be compatible with cards over a certain size. They appear to be dumb pin converters, but I could be wrong.
• One of the adapters may have grounded out on the drive carrier. There is electrical tape along the bottom as shown in the photo, but it's easily pierced. When removing the 8GB cards, the adapters became a little loose. I didn't notice this until later when I tried tightening-up the screws holding the CF adapters to the drive carrier.

Maybe I'll do some more detective work in the future, but for now this empeg has an old 60 and 80GB drive in there getting filled with tunes.

Not all CF cards will ever work correctly as "slaves". I think the original CF spec assumed master/single drive configs, but my memory is fuzzy about that now.


Not an issue. "IDE" mode is the normal access method for CF cards.


You can rule that one out, too. The same pins are required for any size drive, from 1MB to 2TB in size. So it's not a drive size issue.


That's a good and likely possibility, and not too difficult to troubleshoot.

I do have a couple of empegs here with dual 16GB cards installed and working.

Cheers

Double-stick foam tape might make for a better spacer / insulator under the cards.

Another possibility is that the master/slave jumpers on the carriers may not be totally correct -- eg. perhaps there's a solder bridge somewhere that needs to be cut for the jumpers to work properly.

Yeah. I'm going to take a closer look later, but now that there are hard drives in that empeg, I'm not feeling very motivated.

I think real SSDs are a better option as long as they keep making PATA versions. The 32GB CF cards are probably destined for ebay.

Still, a pretty good bargain -- two 32GB cards are probably less than half the cost of a 64GB SSD.

Cheers

Foam tape was my first thought too.

But a spacer, or stack of washers, between the tray and cards would also work.

I've been running a pair of 32GB CF cards for about a year with zero problems.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200175

Anyone see these?

That looks fantastic!

Pricy, but awesome.

Actually, does it present both CF cards as one drive, or does it just present them as master and slave? If the latter, you're better off getting a cheaper solution, since the empeg already has enough space for two drives.

Or you could try this which is essentially the same thing for a lot less. It works quite well.

pca

It just presents the two cards as master and slave, right? That is, it's not doing any sort of RAID?

The reason I ask, if it's not obvious, is that it would be cool to get four CF cards in the empeg instead of two. I'm approaching the point where I'm going to have to switch back to hard drives due to storage limitations.

Yes, it'd be nice if that Darkwire adapter were RAID0, then you might get back some of the lost speed as well (for notebook use anyway, not that relevant for the empeg).

Hm, found one.

You could combine two 3-way CF-to-IDE adapters, six of these 4-way MicroSDHC-to-CF adapters, and twenty-four 16GB MicroSDHC cards and get a 384GB flash empeg.

Sure, it'd cost you about $2000, but who's counting?

I bought one of them, but I'm not sure if it is actually useful. None of the threaded screw holes line up with a 2.5 inch drive:



So I'm not sure how I'd use it as a direct replacement for an existing drive.

Drill new holes?
Double-sided foam sticky tape?
Velcro?

Just one of the screws? All you need, really.

I don't think any of the holes will line up with any of the screws on the empeg drive tray and also allow the cable to reach. Though admittedly I haven't yet opened an empeg to check.

Sure I could stick it down, but they I'm likely to have to deal with whatever I stick it down with failing in time. I naively assumed this would have holes to match a real drive

I have certainly used some laptops where this CF holder definitely would not be usable due to the lack of screw alignment.

There appears to be 2 holes on the PCB side right next to the header? Its slightly off from the standard screw holes but it should work if you wedge a nut in or something?

There are, but I bought this because I expected it to be an easy clean fit. I'd rather get another adapter that has the right screw holes than mess about bodging this one.

All my own fault really, it is perfectly clear from the ebay photo that the holes are in odd places.