CF empeg

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 15/03/2007 20:01

Do you anticipate releasing this newer version of Hijack anytime soon, Mark?

I might just get an adaptor (configure it for slave) and a low-capacity CF card...

Posted by: Major_Sarcasm

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 15/03/2007 20:04

This seems to be a very good price... anyone have any experience of these drives in an empeg?

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 15/03/2007 20:17

Quote:
Do you anticipate releasing this newer version of Hijack anytime soon, Mark?

I might just get an adaptor (configure it for slave) and a low-capacity CF card...

Yeah, I hope to sit down with it again over the weekend to iron out the kinks and add the Hijack menu support for controlling the feature. Whether I release it for others depends on whether anyone else is going to use it or not.

If you want it, then get yourself a CF-IDE adapter board, configure it as SLAVE, and install it in your player. Then get a small (or huge, whatever) CF card for it, and let me know you're ready to try it.

Cheers

Posted by: FireFox31

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 15/03/2007 23:48

If the CF is just used for storing the kernel, (tags?), cache, etc, then maybe it can be small enough to be disposable, letting us not care if it gets thrashed beyond its writability. CF cards must be like any other technology; people upgrade and want to get rid of their older smaller version. There must be stacks of 128 meg cards for the empeg to eat.

It would be great if tags on the CF could make it faster to load large playlists. 1.03 rarely hesitated as much as 2.0, and maybe that's why.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 16/03/2007 00:05

Quote:

It would be great if tags on the CF could make it faster to load large playlists. 1.03 rarely hesitated as much as 2.0, and maybe that's why.

I think the biggest win, though rarely used, will be database rebuilds. Those are dominated by seek times, which are reduced to zero on a CF device.

Cheers

Posted by: Major_Sarcasm

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 17/03/2007 15:45

Quote:
If you want it, then get yourself a CF-IDE adapter board, configure it as SLAVE, and install it in your player. Then get a small (or huge, whatever) CF card for it, and let me know you're ready to try it.

Cool, will do

Posted by: Major_Sarcasm

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 28/03/2007 07:45

Talking about Compact Flash Empegs as we have been, has anyone else noticed these? Just about to come to market, they would negate the need for an adaptor at all and would appear to be coming to a shop near you in a variety of audiophile-friendly sizes.

I realise that the interface is SATA, but one would assume that someone will release a non-SATA version for backwards compatibilty with older laptops, etc (unless SATA in 2.5" form-factor is already backwards compatible? I'm not sure).

Comments?

Edit: Cor... gonna be expensive though. Maybe not then

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 28/03/2007 12:37

Quote:
Talking about Compact Flash Empegs as we have been, has anyone else noticed these?

I've held one of those in my hands recently.

The word on the street is that *nobody* is working on new PATA ("IDE") drives -- everything has gone SATA. I don't know if that's strictly true or not, but..

Cheers

Posted by: JBjorgen

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 28/03/2007 13:01

The adapters to convert from sata to pata are small and cheap. It wouldn't be difficult to put two of these drives and adapters into an empeg.

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 28/03/2007 17:03

It may not be "new", but PQI makes a 64GB 44-pin IDE 2.5" flash drive.

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 29/03/2007 02:14

Quote:
It may not be "new", but PQI makes a 64GB 44-pin IDE 2.5" flash drive.

Capacity: 64MB~16GB

Posted by: Major_Sarcasm

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 29/03/2007 04:43

Quote:
Capacity: 64MB~16GB

The site actually states (for the Turbo DOM):

Quote:
64MB-64GB Storage Capacities

Edit: I googled some prices and they're ludicrous.

Posted by: Ezekiel

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 29/03/2007 17:33

Uh, yeah:

"64GB IDE or SATA, 2.5", 14.5mm height $10500"

-Zeke

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2007 21:20

http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot

Here is a different adapter. 2 slots per card. So you get the keep the space of one drive for something else. Unit is 1cm thk but has the 44pin socket pointing up. That seems an advantage. Price $45. About 50% more expensive than the others at $16 ea.

Quote:
Features:
- RoHS 2.5” form factor CF to IDE interface
- 2 slots, supporting Type I/II CF Card and Microdrive
- Male 44-pin and/or 40-pin IDE connector. May require a 40 or 44-pin cable, (not included).
- Power Voltage 5V. 40-pin version with 4-pin power connector on-board
- LED indicator
- Dimension: 75mm x 70mm (2.95" x 2.76") x10mm
- G. W. : 60g ( 2.12 oz)
- Due to IDE restrictions, the CF card is not hot-swappable.

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2007 21:28

Quote:
Hmmm... That does look nice...

This makes me think of an interesting little side project. A lot of the internal volume of the empeg is devoted to the shock tray for the drives. If you were just dealing with the main board with a remote display (see other projects), it might be possible to modify an empeg into a "slimline" version, completely shockproof and easily mountable anywhere...

Paul, It's and attractive idea. What size do you think the box would need to be?

Posted by: pgrzelak

Re: CF empeg - 02/04/2007 07:54

To be honest, I have not given it that much additional thought...

Posted by: matthew_k

Re: CF empeg - 02/04/2007 15:27

Quote:
2 slots per card. So you get the keep the space of one drive for something else.

Huh, I didn't look too hard, but does it work by making one master and one slave? It would be pretty complex to work any way else. Perhaps this will raise the value of my MkI.

Matthew

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 02/04/2007 17:05

Quote:
Quote:
2 slots per card. So you get the keep the space of one drive for something else.

Huh, I didn't look too hard, but does it work by making one master and one slave? It would be pretty complex to work any way else. Perhaps this will raise the value of my MkI.

Matthew

Cool. With the Mk1 you get to install up to four cards! With current (cheap) CF tech, that's a solid-state 32GB!

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg - 02/04/2007 23:57

I ordered one of the two slot cf adapters last night. This morning I received and email - there's a 10 day lead time. This in spite of ordering the version that was not marked as special order.

Posted by: snoopstah

Re: CF empeg - 05/04/2007 10:01

Here's another adapter just launched: http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad44midecf.asp

$29 for the two-slot model. Sorry, not read the whole thread, so don't know if you've seen this one already.

Posted by: Phoenix42

Re: CF empeg - 05/04/2007 10:09

From the page snoopstah linked to:
http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq_secure_cf.asp
I think I'll start a thread in Off-Topic

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg - 06/04/2007 00:26

There is a mention, in that FAQ, of CF cards that ID as either fixed or removable.
Is that difference important to an empeg?

I don't seem to ever remember seeing CF cards for sale where the choice was available. Nor did is seem important to the sellers to ID the same as one or the other.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 06/04/2007 00:29

Quote:
There is a mention, in that FAQ, of CF cards that ID as either fixed or removable.
Is that difference important to an empeg?

My IDE driver in the empeg kernel doesn't care.

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg - 06/04/2007 01:07

Sad to admit that if I had found that card during my searches, I'd have bought it instead.

Posted by: SE_Sport_Driver

Re: CF empeg - 08/04/2007 10:11

Bad ass Rob. If I were to do this, I'd go with two CF drives also. No heat, no moving parts, easy to swap/backup. Nice.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 07/05/2007 22:24

Mmm... 16GB cards are now becoming almost affordable for this sort of upgrade.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 17/07/2007 01:07

Quote:
Mmm... 16GB cards are now becoming almost affordable for this sort of upgrade.

Okay, my primary player now sports dual 16GB CF cards -- the cheapie A-Data ones, which are actually quite fast.

And there's no looking back. I absolutely love the speed boost that this gives my player!

'Can hardly wait until 32GB CF cards become available -- at that point I'll equip all of my players with pairs of them!

Cheers

Posted by: Robotic

Re: CF empeg - 17/07/2007 04:11

Quote:
I absolutely love the speed boost that this gives my player!

Sounds great! Any comparison data?

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 17/07/2007 09:37

Quote:
Quote:
I absolutely love the speed boost that this gives my player!
Sounds great! Any comparison data?

Nothing measured -- and not likely to be for a while, as I'm in the classroom for much of this week, using this exact unit as a demo/illustration of an early embedded Linux system.

But one very obvious one: I have an "All" playlist, which selects all artists. Clicking on this in the web interface, to bring up the list of artists, used to take about 15-20 seconds (seeking around to read a bunch of tag files) while the player was playing an mp3. It now takes about 3 seconds.

I expect database rebuilds to be equally improved(!), but haven't actually rebuilt a database yet, since I just copied everything over as-was from the single 30GB hard drive.

EDIT: and startup is noticeably faster too. The waving Tux animation gets preempted by the player startup now, and music is coming out before the static logo is done.

Cheers

Posted by: FireFox31

Re: CF empeg - 19/07/2007 23:20

What was the consensus on burning out the card from excessive write operations by the software? Or are the cards smart enough to avoid those dead spots?

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 19/07/2007 23:57

Quote:
What was the consensus on burning out the card from excessive write operations by the software? Or are the cards smart enough to avoid those dead spots?

They're supposed to be smart enough, but not all of them are. I don't think there's any way to tell which is which, though.

But for the empeg, only the dynamic data partition gets written to with any kind of frequency, and that's infrequent enough as to not be an issue (I think).

Cheers

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF empeg - 20/07/2007 00:27

There's a filesystem (whose name I forget) designed for flash memory that is supposed to avoid hotspots. You might consider transitioning to that. Not that that helps with the dynamic data partition.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 20/07/2007 02:07

Quote:
There's a filesystem (whose name I forget) designed for flash memory that is supposed to avoid hotspots. You might consider transitioning to that. Not that that helps with the dynamic data partition.

JFFS, JFFS2, LogFS, etc.. are all designed for use on raw flash chips.

CompactFlash cards are not raw flash chips but, rather, have an included controller that performs the same types of functions as JFFS(2) and LogFS on top of the Linux MTD layer: wear-levelling, ECC, bad page remapping, etc..

So we're already using one of the better solutions: the dynamic data partiion is a raw access, or custom, filesystem that uses very minimal writes (no meta data or timestamps whatsoever).

It's already as good as it can get.

Cheers

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF empeg - 20/07/2007 02:17

I did not know that. Interesting.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 20/07/2007 14:09

Quote:
Quote:

It would be great if tags on the CF could make it faster to load large playlists. 1.03 rarely hesitated as much as 2.0, and maybe that's why.

I think the biggest win, though rarely used, will be database rebuilds. Those are dominated by seek times, which are reduced to zero on a CF device.

Well, I didn't do a perfect comparison, but here I was juggling two empegs yesterday, with nearly identical contents. I started a database rebuild on the single-HD player, and then later, at about 50% on the HD player, started a database rebuild on the dual-CF player.

They finished within about 4 seconds of each other, so the CF based player was around twice as quick as the HD based player. That's 24GB of tunes on each.

Cheers

Posted by: gbeer

A question about CF and RAM expansion - 21/07/2007 23:22

How does using CF based disks impact the desirability of adding RAM to a player? (Mk2 or Mk2a)

Posted by: sein

Re: A question about CF and RAM expansion - 22/07/2007 11:14

Quote:
How does using CF based disks impact the desirability of adding RAM to a player? (Mk2 or Mk2a)

Adding RAM to the player [1] increases the space available for the database, so you can have big disks with lots of music and [2] increases the amount of cache you have to keep hard drives spun down for longer. Oh yeah, also there is [3] more RAM available for 3rd party software.

[1] is irrelevant in a CF system as CF cards are simply not big enough (yet) to fill with enough music and make database size much of an issue. [2] is irrelevant in a CF system as its all solid state and fine for reading from while driving down a cobbled street. [3] is the only reason you'd want to upgrade the RAM in a CF Empeg I guess.

Posted by: gbeer

Re: A question about CF and RAM expansion - 22/07/2007 14:09

So with 1 & 2 NOT being an issue, can enough cache be freed to be useful for other tasks?

Or maybe the question should be, "What is the minimum amount of cache needed when using CF drives?"

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg: a question about building the disk. - 22/07/2007 20:52

As one of the uninitiated, I didn't expect the builder to complete with an infinite stress test.

So,was pulling the power as I did safe?

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 24/07/2007 01:12

I've completed my CF upgrade using the
http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot adaptor and the same 16GB CF that Mark found.

Some items to note:
- The first connector on the stock cable can't be used with this adapter.
- The 3.5" connector isn't useful. I'll be desoldering all the pins soon.
- I wound up mounting this at right angles. See pics. This has the advantage of making it easy to R&R the CF card or to add a second one when needed, without having to do more than pull the cover. Also the cable folds well without blocking the vents.

[img]http://empegbbs.com/files/301875-cf.JPG/img]

Posted by: FireFox31

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 25/07/2007 00:25

That's quite an upgraded player. Good work.

So, two CF cards per IDE adapter, two IDE adapters per empeg = 4 CF cards, yielding a total 64 gig solid state player? Take THAT iPod.

Then go nuts with remote VFD and the motherboard/CFs mounted in a slim case, and you've got quite a piece of hardware.

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 25/07/2007 00:40

I'm only following in others footsteps.

As stated earlier in the thread the 4 CFdrive trick only works for Mk1 empegs. Mk2's only have a single ide bus so they max out with CF drives.

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 25/07/2007 01:39

BTW: The CF card is an A-DATA 16GB from Newegg for $131.99. Tax and shipping made it $146.55.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg: a question about building the disk. - 01/08/2007 09:18

Quote:
As one of the uninitiated, I didn't expect the builder to complete with an infinite stress test.

So,was pulling the power as I did safe?

Yes. And for the same reasons that you can simply unplug an empeg at any time during normal operation.

Cheers

Posted by: mlord

Re: A question about CF and RAM expansion - 01/08/2007 09:25

Quote:
So with 1 & 2 NOT being an issue, can enough cache be freed to be useful for other tasks?

Or maybe the question should be, "What is the minimum amount of cache needed when using CF drives?"

Probably about a megabyte or so; not verified.

One thing I noticed on our recent 3000km road trip, was that my 16MB player running v3alpha-11 s/w frequently never "spun down" the CF cards when playing high bitrate mp3 files. I probably have an unintended "ReserveCache=xx" line in there, copied by mistake from my 32MB player.

CF cards would be similarly suitable for FLAC playback, as that also never "spins down" the drives in use. But the cards need to get bigger first.

Cheers

Posted by: Nobbie

Re: CF empeg - 14/08/2007 09:03

So after reading the entire thread i am very impressed.

Empeg Mk2/Mk2a can have upto 32GB flash memory, using the single IDE, Master/Slave arrangement, with an IDE>CF Adapter.

Empeg Mk1 can have upto 64GB flash memory, using the dual IDE, with the dual IDE>CF Adapter.

Benefits are lighter, faster, more reliable, and easier backups, for the empeg.

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg - 15/08/2007 01:45

That's with currently available cf of reasonable price.

Posted by: Nobbie

Re: CF empeg - 15/08/2007 10:19

Its a shame that PC Engines won't ship to the UK for personal's. I think i've gonna try and convert mine to 16GB.

Posted by: siberia37

Re: A question about CF and RAM expansion - 15/08/2007 13:30

Unrelated question to any IDE experts:
Would a CF Slot->IDE adapter be possible? Meaning could you theoritically make an adaptor to hook up an IDE cable to say a Digital Camera's CF connector, thus making your Camera able to write to a 2.5in Hard drive? Not sure why you'd want to do this but in the studio it could be practical.

Posted by: canuckInOR

Re: A question about CF and RAM expansion - 15/08/2007 15:48

Quote:
Unrelated question to any IDE experts:
Would a CF Slot->IDE adapter be possible? Meaning could you theoritically make an adaptor to hook up an IDE cable to say a Digital Camera's CF connector, thus making your Camera able to write to a 2.5in Hard drive? Not sure why you'd want to do this but in the studio it could be practical.

Theoretically, I'm sure you could do something like this, but like you say, why would you want to (neat-o factor aside)? I really doubt it would be practical in the studio -- cameras that are typically used in a studio setting are already capable of being tethered to a computer via USB or wireless.

Posted by: peter

Re: A question about CF and RAM expansion - 15/08/2007 16:32

Quote:
Would a CF Slot->IDE adapter be possible? Meaning could you theoritically make an adaptor to hook up an IDE cable to say a Digital Camera's CF connector, thus making your Camera able to write to a 2.5in Hard drive? Not sure why you'd want to do this but in the studio it could be practical.

CF cards can operate in two modes: "true IDE" mode, and, er, some other more memory-card-like mode. This means that a device using real IDE can always attach to a CF card, but not all devices that use CF cards can attach to real IDE. If the CF-using device can only use non-IDE mode, a hard drive won't work. Typically cameras use non-IDE mode: back in the Rio Carbon days, we used special "embedded" CF hard-drives which only understood true-IDE mode, produced specifically in order not to cannibalise sales of the higher-margin dual-mode consumer drives compatible with most cameras. The stitch-up, sorry, mark-up on the camera ones was so high that for a while the retail price of a whole 6Gb Rio Carbon was less than the retail price of a camera-compatible 6Gb CF drive.

Peter

Posted by: tman

Re: A question about CF and RAM expansion - 15/08/2007 18:38

Quote:
Quote:
Would a CF Slot->IDE adapter be possible? Meaning could you theoritically make an adaptor to hook up an IDE cable to say a Digital Camera's CF connector, thus making your Camera able to write to a 2.5in Hard drive? Not sure why you'd want to do this but in the studio it could be practical.

CF cards can operate in two modes: "true IDE" mode, and, er, some other more memory-card-like mode. This means that a device using real IDE can always attach to a CF card, but not all devices that use CF cards can attach to real IDE. If the CF-using device can only use non-IDE mode, a hard drive won't work. Typically cameras use non-IDE mode: back in the Rio Carbon days, we used special "embedded" CF hard-drives which only understood true-IDE mode, produced specifically in order not to cannibalise sales of the higher-margin dual-mode consumer drives compatible with most cameras. The stitch-up, sorry, mark-up on the camera ones was so high that for a while the retail price of a whole 6Gb Rio Carbon was less than the retail price of a camera-compatible 6Gb CF drive.

The early models of the various devices with a HD CF inside actually had the standard IDE/CF firmware in them. Lots of people bought them up and ripped them apart for the drive. Eventually somebody somewhere got annoyed enough about this to change the firmware and/or the actual connection. The Seagate pocket HD USB drives were like this. The early ones had a standard CF inside but the later ones had a ribbon cable instead.

Even if you did bodge together this adapter, you'd still have to work out some way of powering the HD. I doubt the CF connector will supply enough power for a full sized HD.

Posted by: Nobbie

Re: CF empeg - 20/08/2007 09:08

I've just managed to get 2 CF->IDE adapters on Ebay for £10 delivered.
I was surprised to see lots of 16GB CF cards on the bay, but they come with a free adapter, so i'm assuming they are 2 8gb cards, and a dual CF adapter.

I've also just got some 8gb cards from ukdvdr, so for under £100 i'm going to try and convert my spare empeg to CF.

Posted by: andy

Re: CF empeg - 20/08/2007 11:49

The 16GB cards on ebay look like real 16GB cards to me. Given that they are being sold as ideal for digital cameras an adapter that combined cards wouldn't exactly be useful...

Posted by: Nobbie

Re: CF empeg - 21/08/2007 07:00

I think the picture is photoshop'd, and you'll get 2 8gb cards, and a dual ide->CF. Apparently Samsung, but the pic shows no brands, etc. I'm happier with 2 warrantied 8gb's.

Posted by: LittleBlueThing

Re: CF empeg - 21/08/2007 08:06

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320149062546

Quotes:

Quote:
8GB CF card here is an example Only

Quote:
PLUS a free CF-IDE Adapter

Quote:
New 16 GB CF Compact Flash Memory Card

Quote:
**** Attn customers: Please make sure your camera support 16GB capacity, some camera may require firmware upgrade to support 16GB capacity *****

Sounds like a single 16Gb CF card with a free IDE adapter to me

I know eBay has its share of villains - but I think we sometimes forget just how little some of this stuff costs back at the source.

I'm just watching them and using the amazing jbidwatcher to track and snipe on every single CF card on eBay. And using it's great multisnipe feature it will only buy one of them!

Seriously cool bit of GPL java software that runs on Linux

(and Windows

).

It's saved me a fortune.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 21/08/2007 11:50

The two 16GB A-Data cards in my empeg came from eBay. CDN$150/each Buy-It-Now price, shipped from within Canada (to me in Canada). Quite reasonable at the time, and even still today.

Posted by: gbeer

CF empeg + batterys??? - 09/09/2007 17:21

I'm wondering if enough battery capacity can be wedged into a CF empeg to be useful?

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg + batterys??? - 09/09/2007 19:38

Quote:
I'm wondering if enough battery capacity can be wedged into a CF empeg to be useful?

Mmm.. should be doable. I seem to recall measuring the HD empeg (single drive) at about 12W continuous draw, which means it could be powered by 10 x AA NiMH batteries for about two hours. The CF empeg should be lower power, but I have not measured it.

Cheers

Posted by: russell

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 08:34

Has anybody else thought about hacking in another ide channel on a mk2 player.
I've just been giving it some thought, and think it should be possible if we can find a couple of spare gpio pins. And make a modified ide cable (4 connectors but some of the control pins for the 2 new drivers would need to be diverted to new gpio pins).

Just a though, not sure what kernel changes would be required (Mark care to comment?)

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 11:25

Quote:
Has anybody else thought about hacking in another ide channel on a mk2 player.
I've just been giving it some thought, and think it should be possible if we can find a couple of spare gpio pins. And make a modified ide cable (4 connectors but some of the control pins for the 2 new drivers would need to be diverted to new gpio pins).

Just a though, not sure what kernel changes would be required (Mark care to comment?)

A single "spare" GPIO (or just plain Ouput) pin is enough to do this, possibly in combination with an inverter. The kernel change is trivial (for me).

The extra signal is best if routed over the existing IDE header. There are pins there that we don't currently need, so freeing one or two of those up is relatively easy.

Cheers

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 11:29

Quote:
Quote:
Has anybody else thought about hacking in another ide channel on a mk2 player.
I've just been giving it some thought, and think it should be possible if we can find a couple of spare gpio pins. And make a modified ide cable (4 connectors but some of the control pins for the 2 new drivers would need to be diverted to new gpio pins).

Just a though, not sure what kernel changes would be required (Mark care to comment?)

A single "spare" GPIO (or just plain Ouput) pin is enough to do this, possibly in combination with an inverter. The kernel change is trivial (for me).

Heck, for that matter, NO extra GPIO pin is needed if one is willing to add a tiny bit of extra (chip) logic onto the board. A small 4-bit mux, for example.

But even simpler, a tiny bit of rewiring (no new GPIO, no new chips) at the header and IDE cables could likely suffice --> just send a different address line to CS2 of each drive pair.

Cheers

Posted by: russell

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 12:46

It's been quite a while since I've dealt with low level ide stuff. But i can't find any reference to a CS2 line. Only CS0 & CS1, wouldn't both of these need re-routing for the 2nd pair of drives?

Cheers

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 13:34

Quote:
It's been quite a while since I've dealt with low level ide stuff. But i can't find any reference to a CS2 line. Only CS0 & CS1, wouldn't both of these need re-routing for the 2nd pair of drives?

Yeah, faulty memory here. They were originally called CS1 and CS3, back in the days when IDE shared some address decoding with the floppy controller.

Now they're CS0 and CS1. In theory, we need to reroute different address lines from the CPU to both of CS0 and CS1 for each group of two drives. In practice, we might get away with only CS0 done that way, sharing CS1. But both is better.

Cheers

Posted by: russell

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 13:45

Just dug out my serial Lead (and found a PC with com port!) the kernel is reporting ide0 as 0x000-0x007,0x038. Before i crack the lid on my spare player do you know how cs0 & cs1 are connected?

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 14:26

Quote:
Just dug out my serial Lead (and found a PC with com port!) the kernel is reporting ide0 as 0x000-0x007,0x038. Before i crack the lid on my spare player do you know how cs0 & cs1 are connected?

They come from pins 12,13 of one of the PEEL 18CV8-25 chips --> basically an EEPROM programmed by Patrick to handle the address decode logic. I suspect we could just bypass that for the second pair of IDE, and connect directly to, say, A31,A30 or something --> need to find an unused address block.

-ml

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 14:37

Quote:
Quote:
Just dug out my serial Lead (and found a PC with com port!) the kernel is reporting ide0 as 0x000-0x007,0x038. Before i crack the lid on my spare player do you know how cs0 & cs1 are connected?

They come from pins 12,13 of one of the PEEL 18CV8-25 chips --> basically an EEPROM programmed by Patrick to handle the address decode logic. I suspect we could just bypass that for the second pair of IDE, and connect directly to, say, A31,A30 or something --> need to find an unused address block.

-ml

Mmm.. it looks more complex than all that now that I've traced some other inputs to that chip.

I think the easiest bet might be to take over the USB chip select, which comes out on pin 16 from that same PEEL chip. Nobody uses USB anyway, so no great loss. So pin 16 from the PEEL could be used as CS0 for the second IDE pair. And both IDE pairs could just share the existing CS1 signal, which is mostly just a write-only thing anyway (minor s/w mods reguired to IDE driver to never read from ALTSTATUS or CTL registers).

Or, one could add an external NAND chip (or similar) to use, say, A10, to separate the two IDE ports while using the existing CS0/CS1 signals.

Posted by: tfabris

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 14:47

You guys are scary, you know that?

And I mean that in the best possible way.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 14:48

Quote:
Quote:
Just dug out my serial Lead (and found a PC with com port!) the kernel is reporting ide0 as 0x000-0x007,0x038. Before i crack the lid on my spare player do you know how cs0 & cs1 are connected?

They come from pins 12,13 of one of the PEEL 18CV8-25 chips

(the one closest to the CPU, by the way).

Posted by: russell

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 14:58

yeap just traced them back myself, now i wonder if the 2nd ide channel chip selects from the MK1 are still programmed into those 18cv8's?

Posted by: andy

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 15:04

Quote:
You guys are scary, you know that?

Hey, at least they aren't playing with a seemingly lethal home-made laser inches from your face...

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 11/09/2007 16:22

Quote:
yeap just traced them back myself, now i wonder if the 2nd ide channel chip selects from the MK1 are still programmed into those 18cv8's?

No, those two signals got reassigned to the ethernet chip in the Mk2(a) units.

-ml

Posted by: sein

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 22/09/2007 09:41

Quote:
Quote:
Do you anticipate releasing this newer version of Hijack anytime soon, Mark?

I might just get an adaptor (configure it for slave) and a low-capacity CF card...

Yeah, I hope to sit down with it again over the weekend to iron out the kinks and add the Hijack menu support for controlling the feature. Whether I release it for others depends on whether anyone else is going to use it or not.

If you want it, then get yourself a CF-IDE adapter board, configure it as SLAVE, and install it in your player. Then get a small (or huge, whatever) CF card for it, and let me know you're ready to try it.

While my Empeg is apart (drive died) I ordered a CF-IDE board to have a CF+Disk Hybrid. I use my tuner a lot and think it'll be a great idea to have Hijack manage booting off CF - having the player database in fast CF is pretty nice too.

Mark, is the code mature enough to go be released? My CF stuff should arrive next week hopefully.

Posted by: russell

mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 23/09/2007 07:36

Hi,
I've successfully found a way to have a 2nd ide channel on a mk2 player without physically modifying the player in any way.

I've taken the GPIO pin assigned to IDERESET which is on pin 1 of the IDE cable, and used it to multiplex the two chip select lines by placing a quad 2 input nor gate on one dual CF adapter and a quad 2 input NAND gate on the other. ( It should be possible to make this modification on the ribbon cable, but there's little point)

IDERESET is only used to detect a drive refusing to start due to thermal constraint, my modified kernel retains this functionality if a normal HD is used.

Attached is a boot log.

I've still got a problem with the IRQ code to resolve and i'm currently waiting for some CF cards before I can progress much further.

R.

Posted by: mlord

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 23/09/2007 11:15

Quote:

I've still got a problem with the IRQ code to resolve and i'm currently waiting for some CF cards before I can progress much further.

R.

Turn on the "serialize" flag for both IDE "interfaces" in ide.c (equivalent to the kernel command line flags ide0=serialize ide1=serialize.

-ml

Posted by: russell

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 23/09/2007 11:55

Thanks for the pointer, I've given it a try but still get this message intermittently on boot

Partition check:
hda:hda: set_geometry_intr: status=0x58
show_message("0000.0 hda: err: set_geometry_intr")

I've only got tiny CF cards at the moment so i'm not sure if that makes a difference.

Posted by: Major_Sarcasm

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 23/09/2007 12:21

*watches thread in fascination*

Excuse the noob question, but does this mean that we could be looking at a quad-equipped el cheapo-cf empeg in the not too distant future?

Posted by: mlord

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 23/09/2007 12:39

Quote:
Thanks for the pointer, I've given it a try but still get this message intermittently on boot

Partition check:
hda:hda: set_geometry_intr: status=0x58
show_message("0000.0 hda: err: set_geometry_intr")

I've only got tiny CF cards at the moment so i'm not sure if that makes a difference.

That still points to the serialize problem.

Another issue to be solved (if necessary) is how master + slave devices interact at power-on reset time.

Normally, the master+slave device pair talk to each other at power-on, because the master device is supposed to report the slave's condition to the host system when later asked for it.

But here, there are two masters and two slaves sharing those control lines. I'm really unsure as to what they're all going to do.

Cheers

Posted by: russell

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 23/09/2007 13:40

I inserted the line
hwif->serialized = 1;
into "static void init_hwif_data" in driver/block/ide.c

I'm a bit short of time at the moment, I'll take a better look later.

As far as i can tell the master/slave communications are done over the pdiag and dasp signals and that these signals are not used by the host, if that is the case then there traces can simply be cut by the header on the CF adapter, to isolate the two master/slave pairs.

R.

Posted by: dcosta

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 26/09/2007 14:45

http://gadgets.fosfor.se/64-gb-compact-flash-from-samsung
I see it in the picture...
anyone see itfor sale anywhere?

Posted by: tman

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 26/09/2007 17:13

Quote:
http://gadgets.fosfor.se/64-gb-compact-flash-from-samsung
I see it in the picture...
anyone see itfor sale anywhere?

Its not available to buy yet. That press release seems to be just announcing that they've made it.

Posted by: Taym

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 27/09/2007 22:19

Wow. I thought 64 would be a bit further in time; instead, that's promising. Two 64GB is all I need to get rid of my 100GB HD.

Posted by: FireFox31

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 29/09/2007 11:59

I'd heard that digital cameras respond slower when accessing pictures near the end of 2gb or 4gb drives, whereas they're perfectly fast with pictures at the beginning of the drives. Might this urban legend apply to large CF drives in an empeg? Some kind of delay due to addressing such high address space as 16gb, 32gb, or 64gb?

Still, sounds like fun. $150 for a 16gb Ridata CF card. Still need some time for higher capacity cards to push the price down.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg with http://www.psism.com/adcf.htm#2-slot - 29/09/2007 12:20

Quote:
I'd heard that digital cameras respond slower when accessing pictures near the end of 2gb or 4gb drives, whereas they're perfectly fast with pictures at the beginning of the drives.

Huh? Sounds unlikely, unless it's due to a camera dumping *everything* into one big directory (like our beloved empeg does by default..).

Quote:

Might this urban legend apply to large CF drives in an empeg? Some kind of delay due to addressing such high address space as 16gb, 32gb, or 64gb?

No.

Posted by: russell

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 04/10/2007 14:17

I've just got back from holiday and my new CF cards have arrived. so i have 3 x 8gb + 1 x16gb unfortunately i can't get the 16gb to be either a master or a slave with an 8gb, what ever i do only one of them is detected, what makes it stranger is that an old 8mb card is detected as a slave to the 16gb card.

anyway I have 3 drives working as far a Linux, I now need to make them visible to the player.

I've tried creating a /drive2 and symlinking it to /empeg/fids2 just in case, I didn't really expect it to work, and it didn't!

so I need to come up with some thing else. options i've thought of (but not tried yet) are
1. mount the 3rd drive under /drive0/fids as one of the _* directories
2. mount the 3rd drive as /drive0 and create sym-links into /drive0/fids/
3. set up a raid array

I also need to implement a custom init script to mount the extra drives etc.

Posted by: mlord

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 04/10/2007 15:52

Quote:
I've just got back from holiday and my new CF cards have arrived. so i have 3 x 8gb + 1 x16gb unfortunately i can't get the 16gb to be either a master or a slave with an 8gb, what ever i do only one of them is detected, what makes it stranger is that an old 8mb card is detected as a slave to the 16gb card.

Ah.. If this is in the modified setup, then it might be the first sign of this issue (below) appearing:

Quote:

Another issue to be solved (if necessary) is how master + slave devices interact at power-on reset time.

Normally, the master+slave device pair talk to each other at power-on, because the master device is supposed to report the slave's condition to the host system when later asked for it.

But here, there are two masters and two slaves sharing those control lines. I'm really unsure as to what they're all going to do.

Posted by: FireFox31

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 05/10/2007 22:05

Quote:
3. set up a raid array

RAID 5!! Redundancy for when the CF's burn out.

You guys are shockingly smart.

Posted by: russell

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 08/10/2007 10:17

I've resolved the issue of hdb not getting detected, and have created a raid 0.90 linear array, out of the 4 cards. ( only for the music partition). I've symlinked /dev/hda4 to /dev/md0 so the player sees it all as one big disk.

Currently rsync'ing my music.

Once the rsync has finished i'll report back on boot times etc.

I stopped the rsync and rebuilt the array as a raid0 so that the 4 cards are accessed in parallel, so that if the rsync completes ok i can be more confident that the system is stable.

The rsync complete successfully.

The player boots up on AC in 15 seconds compared to 21 seconds for my hard disk based player.

A couple of those 15 seconds are spent assembling the RAID0 array, When I was using a LINEAR array it was a little quicker.

Posted by: eagle

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 08/10/2007 14:33

Let me understand this correctly:
I have a MK1 Empeg with 2x 44-pin hdd cables, are you saying I could buy 2 of these:
http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11630
with 4 CF cards inserted and upon boot the Empeg would see 4 HD drives and make use of them without any software hacks?

Posted by: russell

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 08/10/2007 17:20

Not quite, the player software only knows how to mount and use 2 disks, you need to find a way to fool it. I've done so by making a RAID array out of the four disks so the player sees them as one big disk, this however requires a custom kernel be built with the raid 0.90 drivers patched in.

Also I tried the adapters you linked too, but couldn't get them to work with 2 cards installed. in the end I ordered 2 off http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11631 and have further modified them to support four CF cards in a MK2a player.

Posted by: eagle

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 08/10/2007 17:48

Yes but as far as I understand it you are doing this on a mk2 player, what I meant is, would it work out of the box on a mk1 player or would the software modifications (raid or whatever else) be required too?
Thanks for telling me that the dual adapter didn't work (maybe on a MK1 it would though?).
How did you use 2 single adapters to attach 4 CF cards or am I misunderstanding you?

Posted by: russell

Re: mk2a dual ide channels progress report - 09/10/2007 07:12

You are correct I have a mk2 player, so I can't say for sure whether or not the mk1 player application would support 4 drives, I do however think it very unlikely.

I couldn't get those first adapters to work with 2 cards on a PC either so i don't think it's empeg related.

The alternative link I provided was wrong (sorry) it should have been http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=11677 a different dual CF adapter, I have 2 of them hence the 4 cards.

I think I should reiterate here that you can't just plug two of these adapters into a mk2 player and expect them to work, I've had to modify each adapter ( cut a couple of tracks and patch in some logic gates) as well as modifying the kernel and hacking the root file system a little to make all this work.

Posted by: avatarTX

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 10/10/2007 09:50

Quote
"It may not be "new", but PQI makes a 64GB 44-pin IDE 2.5" flash drive. "

I am seeing more and more manufacturers release these now. Samsung makes them too, in sizes from 8GB to 64GB. Of course, the larger drives cost the big bucks right now but I expect in a year or two (maybe when my old fashioned IDE drives need to be replaced anyways?) the price will be more affordable.

These new SSD's seem ideal for the empeg. No moving parts, no worries about bumps in the road, they use less power and generate less heat. Seems perfect to me. My only concern would be how to move all the data to the new drive, is there a util like Ghost or something that can move it.. seeing that its 'Penguin' based?

Posted by: Roger

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 10/10/2007 11:38

Quote:
is there a util like Ghost or something that can move it..

Well, there's 'dd'.

Or there's (cd /source && tar cf - . ) | ( cd /dest && tar xf - )

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 10/10/2007 16:47

Quote:
Quote:
is there a util like Ghost or something that can move it..

Well, there's 'dd'.

Not to mention the simpler cat and cp commands.

Cheers

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 11/10/2007 00:44

On some OSes dd is required for this sort of thing due to needing to use a block device and the kernel not dealing very well with writes not matching block sizes. cp and cat (well, the shell's output redirection algorithm, technically) assume that they can write as much or as little as they want in each individual operation, but with dd you can specify that the block size be a specific size. Linux has none of these problems, though, nor do any other modern Unices I can think of.

Posted by: andy

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 11/10/2007 06:29

My first encounter with Unix was back in 1991/1992 when I was using Sun workstations to write Linux root/boot floppies. Maybe the Sun Unix at the time required the use of dd and that it why I became fixated on it ?

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 11/10/2007 13:31

I wouldn't be surprised.

Incidentally, that's not too far off from my experiences, except it was DECstations for me.

Posted by: sein

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 21/10/2007 17:43

These adapters looked pretty basic, so I went with one from Hong Kong on eBay (see here) for less than £3 delivered. Although it is not as neat as having one the right size for mounting on the drive tray, I'm happy with it. Mine is stuck on to the drive tray with some sticky back velcro (hook and loop) and a cable tie. Its definitely not going anywhere

dmesg on my Empeg shows:
(...)
hda: TOSHIBA MK4025GAS, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-256, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x000-0x007,0x038 on irq 6
hda: TOSHIBA MK4025GAS, 38154MB w/0kB Cache, CHS=4864/255/63
hdb: SanDisk SDCFB-256, 245MB w/1kB Cache, CHS=980/16/32
(...)
Partition check:
hda: hda1 < hda5 hda6 > hda2 hda3 hda4
hdb: hdb1
(...)
attempt to access beyond end of device
03:44: rw=0, want=2, limit=0
dev 03:44 blksize=1024 blocknr=1 sector=2 size=1024 count=1

I think the last part (beyond end of device) is related, I'm not too sure.

Mark, I'm not sure whether you've had time to have another look at the Hijack code for your idea (here), but I'm ready to try it out whenever you are.

Posted by: sein

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 21/10/2007 17:45

Posted by: sein

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 21/10/2007 17:52

I've attached the output of hdparm from /proc/ide/hda/identify on my player. I don't see a 'Power-Up In Standby feature set' clause in there. Guess I should have checked this earlier, eh? Mark, will this setup work or do I need a new drive?

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 21/10/2007 19:38

Quote:
I've attached the output of hdparm from /proc/ide/hda/identify on my player. I don't see a 'Power-Up In Standby feature set' clause in there. Guess I should have checked this earlier, eh? Mark, will this setup work or do I need a new drive?

That particular hard drive will not work for this.

But I'm really not into that feature now, as the 16GB cards are cheap enough to put pairs of them into my players (two more cards are now in the mail off of eBay last week, for about $125/each incl/shipping.

I still have the (almost fully functional) code, though.

Cheers

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 21/10/2007 19:57

Quote:
Mine is stuck on to the drive tray with some sticky back velcro (hook and loop) and a cable tie. Its definitely not going anywhere

Is the drilling of additional holes in the drive plate forbidden by the Empeg Modders Creedo. Cause if it is I've been a baaaad boy.

Posted by: sein

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 22/10/2007 07:26

Quote:
That particular hard drive will not work for this.

But I'm really not into that feature now, as the 16GB cards are cheap enough to put pairs of them into my players (two more cards are now in the mail off of eBay last week, for about $125/each incl/shipping.

C'est la vie.

Good thing I went with the el cheapo option I suppose. I'll probably attempt to run the builder on the CF card and install the player image onto it (it should fit into 256MB, right?) and use that as the master. I'll have my 40GB disk as the slave with all my music on it. In theory the only advantage of this would be to make reading and writing to the database much faster. Might as well have a little play around with it since I have all the bits now.

Posted by: sein

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 30/10/2007 15:12

Thought I'd just give a little update. I ran the builder on my little CF card which worked fine but my hard disk doesn't want to be a slave to it. So, I'm back to the CF being a slave. Not a problem, I just symlinked /drive0/var to /drive1/var and noticed some nice benefits. The player is much more responsive when using weblite and playing all tracks in a big shuffled playlist is faster too, though to be fair it was hardly slow before. Rebuilding the database after adding tracks seems about the same as it was before since its still reading from the disk.

I was curious and ran the builder on a Sandisk 'Extreme III' 2GB card I borrowed to see whether it was any better in the Empeg than my standard old 256MB card. The disk stress test results show the data transfer rate to be roughly the same and the seek times to be just 0.2ms faster. So looks to be the IDE bus of the Empeg that is the limit rather than the speed of the card.

So, is it actually worth making a HD+CF Hybrid? Definitely not unless you use weblite a lot. But it kept me amused for a little while on a damp weekend

Posted by: iank

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 11/12/2007 04:57

I stuffed a single 8GB card (safely setting aside my working 60GB disk) and while it boots and works it just will NOT connect to emplode. Serial? Fine. TCP? No worky. Very odd. It's been a long time since I've played with the EMPEG so I'm probably missing something obvious.

Anyway, fun fiddling awaits.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 11/12/2007 12:07

Originally Posted By: iank

Look up the IP address that the empeg is using, on the "About" screen from the main empeg menu.

Then tell Emplode to connect to that "specific address".

Also, if Hijack is installed, then the player has to be in "AC/Home" mode for this to work.

Cheers

Posted by: iank

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 13/12/2007 02:12

Arg. It's not getting an IP. If I pop in the 60GB disk, no problem.

I installed this in the usual manner: flashed the builder image, let it run. Flashed the release dev image and booted.

I can put music on it using the serial port, not a problem. It plays and everything is super peachy. Just slow to load music and I cannot get the web UI setup.

Anway, not a huge issue. Mainly doing this for chuckles.

Oh, and the adpater is ye olde cfdisk.2g from pc engines. Tried with and wihtout the jumper (just soldered the gap). I'm not sure which way to go with a single disk setup, since I've seen some devices you jumper and some you do not. Either way it boots and works, just no TCP action.

I got it to get an IP once and emplode saw it but crashed opening the database. A reboot and the IP was lost, never to be seen again.

I'm wondering if the flash card or adapter might be fuxored. I've upgraded disks of the spinning variety and never had this issue, and have used thses sorts of adapters in other projects so I'm kinda suspecting hardware problems at this point.

Posted by: mlord

32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 29/01/2008 21:03

Isn't progress wonderful!

Posted by: andy

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 29/01/2008 22:12

When we have affordable 64GB cards then my empegs are going solid state.

Posted by: mlord

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 29/01/2008 22:22

Originally Posted By: andy

When we have affordable 64GB cards then my empegs are going solid state.

I already have two empegs with dual-16GB cards. When the 32GB cards get close to $100 or so, I'll replace one card in each empeg with 32GB, and populate two more empegs as well.

16+32 = 48GB, which is great for our needs here!

Cheers

Posted by: andy

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 30/01/2008 08:23

I need about 50GB and I'd rather not have two drives, hence the desire to wait for the 64s.

Posted by: gbeer

Adapter Mania - 19/03/2008 01:13

SHDC to CF Adapter for your CF to IDE Adapter

Posted by: mlord

32GB CF cards.. $134 - 19/03/2008 01:26

32GB CF cards are now US$134 on eBay.

Not quite cheap enough, but getting there..

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Adapter Mania - 19/03/2008 04:47

Why would you want to get an SDHC to CF adapter and use SDHC for this purpose? CF costs less and has greater capacity.

Posted by: Shonky

Re: Adapter Mania - 19/03/2008 07:47

Originally Posted By: wfaulk

Why would you want to get an SDHC to CF adapter and use SDHC for this purpose? CF costs less and has greater capacity.

Not in Australia when I just so happened to be looking today. Not by much though and after you buy the adapter you'd be square at best most likely.

http://www.pricespy.com.au/cat_17.html

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Adapter Mania - 19/03/2008 12:37

Hm. Odd. You'd think that relative pricings would more-or-less be the same.

Posted by: gbeer

Re: Adapter Mania - 20/03/2008 00:02

Originally Posted By: wfaulk

Why would you want to get an SDHC to CF adapter and use SDHC for this purpose? CF costs less and has greater capacity.

Hence the title of the post being "Adapter Mania".

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 25/09/2008 00:07

I just ordered one of these:
http://www.memoryc.com/transcend/ts64gssd25-m.html

to replace my single 40GB harddisk, I better hope it works!

Will let you know how it goes...

Posted by: crazyplums

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 17:46

sooo, did the 64gig ssd do the trick?

i think i've got the general idea now, soo, to summarise..

i need one ide to cf or ssd adaptor, one large card (i have a mk2a) or two, and to possibly remove a resistor (r1) and jump it?
that in itself seems fine and i'm able to do that, but, are any system changes required (operating system / driver i mean), cos that i ain't good at!

Hugh

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 18:10

First, there are two laptop hard drive attachment standards, PATA and SATA. PATA is being displaced by SATA, but the empeg requires PATA.

If you bought a PATA SSD, you'd be good to go. It works just like a magnetic spindle hard drive.

If you bought a SATA SSD, you'd need a SATA to PATA adapter, which I don't think are (yet) small enough to fit inside an empeg case. Basically, don't do that.

If you want to go with CF cards, you just need a CF to PATA adapter, which are cheap. I got the ones mlord recommended and they work great. The resistor removal is specific to that particular adapter. Another one might have different issues, but it should all be fairly straightforward.

Posted by: tfabris

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 18:33

So there are no tweaks or changes to the operating system needed in order for CF/SSD drives to work in the empeg?

You just plug them in, run the builder and the upgrader, and it Just Works?

Posted by: crazyplums

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 18:36

Originally Posted By: wfaulk

thank you, how can i be sure a drive is a PATA? i've just had a nose about and have come across this (not sure i can order from this site though) http://www.memoryc.com/storage/solidstatedisk/transcend32gbinternalssd.html which is 32gb, does not mention sata, just IDE interface, which i assume the pata drives are? would this mean it's a straight forward swap, or am i being too optimistic?

thanks.
Hugh

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 18:59

Originally Posted By: tfabris

You just plug them in, run the builder and the upgrader, and it Just Works?

Correct.

Posted by: tfabris

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 18:59

Originally Posted By: crazyplums

just IDE interface, which i assume the pata drives are?

Yes, PATA drives are IDE interface.

There's also another wrinkle, which is that anything you plug into the empeg has to have a LAPTOP IDE interface. Just "IDE" isn't enough, because a desktop IDE plugs are too big to fit an empeg.

Edit: The one you linked didn't specifically say it had a laptop-sized IDE plug, but it was very clear that it was a "2.5 inch drive" meaning it will likely have a laptop-sized IDE plug.

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 19:07

Originally Posted By: crazyplums

how can i be sure a drive is a PATA?

In this case, IDE is equivalent to PATA, but I wouldn't depend on that. That page says "44-pin connector", which is good enough information. Here are what the different connectors look like (images blatantly stolen from here and here):

Posted by: crazyplums

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 19:10

thanks guys, that's explained that part, cheers.

is it just plug n play then? or am i opening myself a big can of worms?

Posted by: tfabris

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 14/10/2008 20:10

According to Bitt, it's just plug and play. Make sure to follow all of the instructions here.

Posted by: mlord

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 15/10/2008 05:17

Originally Posted By: tfabris

So there are no tweaks or changes to the operating system needed in order for CF/SSD drives to work in the empeg?

You just plug them in, run the builder and the upgrader, and it Just Works?

Yes. Welcome to Linux.

Posted by: Major_Sarcasm

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 16/10/2008 19:24

Originally Posted By: crazyplums

On the linked page, there is a paragraph in bold, thus:

"If intending to install and run an operating system from SSD we recommend choosing a product built using SLC Flash chips. The product you are currently viewing is built using MLC."

These SSDs are a good price and make a solid state Empeg quite realistic for me, but I'm concerned about that statement.

Incidently, this is the SLC based device they refer to and it's hella expensive by comparison (£270)

Posted by: gbeer

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 17/10/2008 00:29

The write speeds are 3x faster on the SLC based device. Which means loading more music and syncing, on a MLC device, will take a noticeably longer amount of time.

Otherwise the Empeg will play a-ok as it normally runs the drive in read-only mode.

Edit: Wow! I just searched, there's nothing in the Faq yet about CF or flash drives...

Posted by: mlord

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 17/10/2008 05:14

The SLC device will handle writes much faster, and probably last 10X as long in a writing environment.

For the empeg, writes are incredibly uncommon, so MLC is perfectly fine, and SLC is a waste of good cash!

Cheers

Posted by: peter

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 17/10/2008 07:10

Originally Posted By: Major_Sarcasm

"If intending to install and run an operating system from SSD we recommend choosing a product built using SLC Flash chips. The product you are currently viewing is built using MLC."

These SSDs are a good price and make a solid state Empeg quite realistic for me, but I'm concerned about that statement.

Modern high-density MLC flash suffers from read disturbance, i.e. each time you read the data, there's a small chance it will become corrupted. The controller in the SSD deals with this (using ECC techniques, a bit like how CD players can recover from small scratches), and rewrites the correct version, but it damages performance for read-intensive uses, and ultimately reduces the lifetime of the device.

But you needn't worry about this for Empeg purposes: it isn't a read-intensive use. Even booting the player is only a few megabytes' worth of reading, and reading the music data during playback is a mere dribble compared to what the author of that page was thinking of: booting Windows XP and having a pagefile on flash. So MLC will be fine.

FWIW, SLC stands for "single-level cell", meaning that each tiny capacitor-like thing in the flash stores either a zero or a one; MLC is "multi-level cell", in which the tiny capacitor is charged to one of four, or even sixteen, different voltages, to store two or four bits in the same cell. Quite frankly, it's amazing that it works at all.

Peter

Posted by: Major_Sarcasm

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 17/10/2008 16:23

Fault-tolerance built in. I like it. For ease of conversion, these seem like a helluva deal.

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 05:18

Originally Posted By: eagle

I just ordered one of these:
http://www.memoryc.com/transcend/ts64gssd25-m.html

to replace my single 40GB harddisk, I better hope it works!

Will let you know how it goes...

I still haven't got round to install the SSD yet, but I think this particular one is a good choice, it's not fast (about 10MB/s tested on a PC) and it's MLC which means less read/write cycles, but as said by others here for this particular use in the empeg all this doesn't matter, read speed is more than enough, write is still faster than USB or 10Mbit Ethernet and the read/write cycles are still way more than needed for the empeg (I believe in the order of 100,000 for each cell).

I hope I find the time to install it in the next few days.

Also I can recommend memoryc.com, this is my second order from them and so far the buying experience has been flawless.

BTW, I currently have a 40GB HDD in the empeg, could I just attach both the old HDD and the new 64GB SSD directly to a PC (with 2.5"->3.5" IDE adapters) and then 'dd' the content over under linux?
Does the empeg use ext2 so I can just resize the filesystem afterwards to make full use of the 64GB?
I know this works for normal Linux partitions as I have done this a few times when upgrading HDDs in Linux boxes, but will it work for the empeg too?

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 05:42

Here is a link to the specs of the Transcend 64GBSSD, that I got:
http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp?ItemID=TS64GSSD25-M

As the description says, it's exactly the same size as a 2.5" HDD, the casing is metal and feels quite solid and the connector is a standard male 44pin IDE connector like a 'normal' 2.5" HDD.

Posted by: Shonky

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 08:23

Originally Posted By: eagle

BTW, I currently have a 40GB HDD in the empeg, could I just attach both the old HDD and the new 64GB SSD directly to a PC (with 2.5"->3.5" IDE adapters) and then 'dd' the content over under linux?
Does the empeg use ext2 so I can just resize the filesystem afterwards to make full use of the 64GB?
I know this works for normal Linux partitions as I have done this a few times when upgrading HDDs in Linux boxes, but will it work for the empeg too?

Yep. Should work just fine. Just add all the space to the largest existing partition (i.e. where the music goes)

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 08:53

Originally Posted By: Shonky

Originally Posted By: eagle

Yep. Should work just fine. Just add all the space to the largest existing partition (i.e. where the music goes)

I did the following procedure now:

- removed old 40GB HDD from empeg and connected it to my Linux PC using a USB-HDD enclosure

- cat /dev/sde > empeg40gb.img

- replaced the 40GB HDD with the new 64GB SSD in the USB-HDD enclosure

- cat empeg40gb.img > /dev/sde

- resize2fs /dev/sde4

- placed the 64GB SSD into the empeg in place of the old 40GB HDD

- powered on the empeg, and everything worked fine as expected!!
all songs are still there and boot from cold power-on now takes 7 seconds (not sure how much it took before but it was longer)

here is the fdisk -l output before and after:

Code:

Disk /dev/sde: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sde1               1           5       40131    5  Extended
/dev/sde2               6          10       40162+  83  Linux
/dev/sde3              11          13       24097+  10  OPUS
/dev/sde4              14        4864    38965657+  83  Linux
/dev/sde5               1           3       24034+  83  Linux
/dev/sde6               4           5       16033+  82  Linux swap / Solaris



Disk /dev/sde: 64.0 GB, 64038633472 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7785 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sde1               1           5       40131    5  Extended
/dev/sde2               6          10       40162+  83  Linux
/dev/sde3              11          13       24097+  10  OPUS
/dev/sde4              14        7785    62428590   83  Linux
/dev/sde5               1           3       24034+  83  Linux
/dev/sde6               4           5       16033+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Fantastic, now I just need to update my signature!

Posted by: Robotic

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 14:12

I just noticed your signature and all the Frontier Labs players you have.
I was pretty sad when Dreamweaver's forum went down. Traffic was down to nil. I still have my Nex Ia as my 'primary' player. It doesn't get much of workout, though. I'm not really part of the iPod Generation that *has* to have music in their ears 24-7. It gets used on flights, if at all.
I was really excited about the player- only one to use CF *and* AA batteries *and* have upgradeable firmware. They seemed to have some fair ideas and then things just died out.

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 19:51

Originally Posted By: Robotic

Yes it's a shame they didn't have more success, but I guess they couldn't compete with the marketing power and distribution channels of the big players (Apple, Sony, Microsoft, ...) and the trend to colour screens and video playback (IMHO not at all necessary in a pocket-sized player, I have no need to watch stamp sized movies).

I too believe the Nex range were the best portable mp3 players ever made, the CF/SD card no internal memory concept is perfect, I never understood the idea of fixed internal memory, why should you have to buy a new player just to have more memory?!

Also AA batteries are so much more convenient, especially when using NiMh rechargeable ones and the user interface is pretty good too, simple but practical, plus no DRM or need for proprietary transfer software, not even a usb cable if you have a card reader on the PC/laptop.

Posted by: Robotic

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 20:26

I didn't understand the 'lucking fovely entertainment' campaign, but they seemed pretty intent upon it.
The website hasn't worked for a long, long time, although it is still out there:
http://www.frontierlabs.com/
There used to be a Yahoo Vendor site, but I can't find that now.
I can't find any mention of the forum I used to go to, either.
I was tempted by the NexBlack, but it didn't quite make it to market.

http://the-gadgeteer.com/review/frontier_labs_nexblack_audio_player

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 21:00

Originally Posted By: Robotic

http://the-gadgeteer.com/review/frontier_labs_nexblack_audio_player

THe Nex Black did make it to market, it was for sale on ebay directly by FrontierLabs for quite a while until recently, currently I can't see it anymore though.

Posted by: Robotic

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 22:06

Hmm- well, in between the time that it was anticipated (and delayed) and the time it made it to market I must have lost focus and stopped looking for it.
These days, if I wanted to replace my personal mp3 player I'd be tempted by a Trekstor Vibez- if they'd only make it a large capacity flash memory player... or swapable memory player... which brings us back to the FL stuff. Last I saw of Trekstor, they seemed to be minimizing their product line and market.

Honestly, with microSD cards already at 8GB how hard would it be to have a bank of slots on a player? Why *wouldn't* you want to pop cards in and out of a player? A lot of phones do just that now. Why can't you pop an 8GB card into an iPod shuffle?

Posted by: tman

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 21/10/2008 23:46

So they can release a larger capacity model every so often I guess...

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 05/11/2008 23:03

Originally Posted By: Robotic

Hmm- well, in between the time that it was anticipated (and delayed) and the time it made it to market I must have lost focus and stopped looking for it.

If you are still interested in the NexBlack, keep an eye on the ebay seller 'nexplayer' from Hong Kong, that's Frontier Labs, they still seem to have a few left which they occasionally put for sale, I just spotted one and couldn't resist buying it for the bargain amount of 4USD + 20USD shipping:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=380078238314

It will probably replace my wife's Nex Ia+.

Posted by: Robotic

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 06/11/2008 00:07

Wow! That's some 'fire sale' price! $25 shipped is hard to pass up.

I'm on the fence about personal music players in general, though, and sorely tempted by Peter's words (below) to invest in a Vibez, if anything.

Originally Posted By: peter

The most recently-released, and probably the final, product in direct descent from the Empeg is the Trekstor Vibez portable MP3 player: that was our H4, our swan-song, our this-is-what-you-could-have-won.

(quote is from this thread.)

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 06/11/2008 00:58

I'm sure the software of the Trekstor Vibez is great as it's an Empeg descent, but I would not be able to live with a fixed internal memory, while the NexBlack can even take a 32GB CF card and more once available...

They have put 3 more NexBlacks up for sale at the same price I paid, you know you want one ;-)
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=380079081034

Posted by: Robotic

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 06/11/2008 02:22

Originally Posted By: eagle

They have put 3 more NexBlacks up for sale at the same price I paid, you know you want one ;-)

*sigh*
Like I said- it's hard to resist that price...

One of the things I liked about the NexIa was the wired remote on the headphone line. The NexBlack seems to have deleted that option. I wonder if the NexIa remote will work.
Another thing I'm wondering is where do you get the latest firmware update?

edit:
Subject: You Won eBay Item:NEXBLACK MP3 Audio Player for CF/Microdrive
Who says I can't have it all??

Posted by: mlord

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 06/11/2008 11:31

Quote:

Like I said- it's hard to resist that price...

US$24 ? That price range has lots of other options, though I suppose this one is special with the CF card and high-speed USB2.

Cheers

Posted by: Robotic

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 06/11/2008 13:00

Originally Posted By: mlord

Quote:

Like I said- it's hard to resist that price...

US$24 ? That price range has lots of other options, though I suppose this one is special with the CF card and high-speed USB2.

Cheers

Considering that I paid nearly $200 for the predecessor model with 1GB microdrive, it's a heckuva deal.
The NexBlack was supposed to sell for something like $90 without a card.
Yes, there are many, many MP3 playing options in the $25 range just now. I think they're all capped at 2GB, though, and using the CF card is, as you mentioned, unique.
I got one of these from Fry's Electronics when they were on sale a while back, but it's absolute crap.

edit:
It was a guy named Dreamflasher that ran the NexGeneration BBS.
http://www.dreamflasher.de/
Not sure what's become of it or him.

Posted by: Robotic

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 19/11/2008 20:16

Since I don't do the eBay thing I had a friend buy it for me. It has arrived at his address and he reports the accompanying CD did not survive the shipment from Hong Kong.

So, what's on the CD?

The NexBlack has sparked my interest in CF cards and I see 8GB cards at NewEgg.com for under $20 or a 16GB card for $35. Hmm...

Posted by: eagle

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 20/11/2008 05:50

The CD is labelled 'driver & utilities for Win98SE and MacOS'. There is also the full manual as pdf on it. Given that I don't use Windows (Linux only) and never use the USB connection (I just eject the CF card and put it into a card reader on my PC when transfering files) I didn't even bother to look at the CD until I saw your email, anyway the whole CD content is about 21MB, if you PM me your email address I can send you everything in one zip file.

BTW, I was just listening to the NexBlack with my Beyerdynamic DT250 studio headphones remembering why else I like the Nex so much, the sound quality is really great, IMHO far better than the Ipod and as good as the Empeg!

Posted by: Robotic

Re: 32GB CF Cards now under $180 (GBP90) and falling.. - 20/11/2008 15:09

You have PM!

Thanks for your help, eagle!

Posted by: Major_Sarcasm

Transcend SSDs - 01/01/2009 09:29

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."

Posted by: tfabris

Re: Transcend SSDs - 03/01/2009 19:45

Heh, reminds me of Acts of Gord.

Posted by: Nobbie

Re: Transcend SSDs - 06/01/2009 14:04

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

Muahahaa.

Posted by: robricc

Re: CF empeg - 31/03/2009 23:41

Time for a slight bump

Posted by: andy

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 05:57

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

Posted by: Robotic

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 13:09

Very sexy, Rob!

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 13:15

Colour coordinated and everything!

Posted by: robricc

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 13:54

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.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 14:29

Originally Posted By: robricc

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.

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.

Quote:

The CF cards may not be 100% compatible being accessed as IDE devices (probably a long shot).

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

Quote:

The IDE-to-CF adapters may not be compatible with cards over a certain size.

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.

Quote:

One of the adapters may have grounded out on the drive carrier.

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

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 14:34

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

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 14:36

Quote:

HDB is always what gets hung-up.

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.

Posted by: robricc

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 15:07

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.

Posted by: mlord

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 15:46

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

Cheers

Posted by: gbeer

Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2009 23:41

Foam tape was my first thought too.

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

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF empeg - 26/04/2009 19:48

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

Posted by: stahimooney

Re: CF empeg - 13/08/2009 01:36

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

Anyone see these?

Posted by: robricc

Re: CF empeg - 13/08/2009 02:47

That looks fantastic!

Posted by: Aragon

Re: CF empeg - 20/09/2009 14:39

http://www.darkwire.com.au/html/ide_ssd_2_5__to_2x_cf.html

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF empeg - 20/09/2009 17:07

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.

Posted by: pca

Re: CF empeg - 21/09/2009 15:35

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

pca

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF empeg - 21/09/2009 16:52

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.

Posted by: hybrid8

Re: CF empeg - 22/09/2009 21:25

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).

Posted by: wfaulk

Re: CF empeg - 23/09/2009 00:25

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?

Posted by: andy

Re: CF empeg - 26/09/2009 08:28

Originally Posted By: pca

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

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.

Posted by: Robotic

Re: CF empeg - 26/09/2009 15:32

Originally Posted By: andy

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?

Posted by: tfabris

Re: CF empeg - 26/09/2009 17:51

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

Posted by: andy

Re: CF empeg - 26/09/2009 21:01

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.

Posted by: tman

Re: CF empeg - 27/09/2009 00:43

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?

Posted by: andy

Re: CF empeg - 27/09/2009 05:53

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.

CF empeg

CF empeg - 09/03/2007 14:59

Re: CF empeg - 09/03/2007 15:21

Re: CF empeg - 09/03/2007 15:36

Re: CF empeg - 09/03/2007 15:38

Re: CF empeg - 09/03/2007 15:40

Re: CF empeg - 09/03/2007 16:27

Re: CF empeg - 09/03/2007 16:27

Re: CF empeg - 09/03/2007 16:30

Re: CF empeg - 09/03/2007 16:54

CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 09/03/2007 21:18

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 10/03/2007 06:15

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 10/03/2007 11:29

Re: CF empeg - 10/03/2007 16:12

Re: CF empeg - 10/03/2007 16:20

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 10/03/2007 17:17

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 10/03/2007 17:24

Re: CF empeg - 10/03/2007 21:57

Re: CF empeg - 10/03/2007 22:15

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 07:57

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 11:14

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 13:44

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 13:53

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 14:03

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 14:55

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 15:23

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 15:25

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 16:38

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 16:53

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 16:56

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 17:02

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 17:04

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 17:10

Re: CF empeg - 11/03/2007 17:29

Re: CF empeg - 12/03/2007 00:13

Re: CF empeg - 12/03/2007 10:20

Re: CF empeg - 13/03/2007 00:50

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 13/03/2007 01:55

Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 13/03/2007 10:48

Re: CF empeg - 14/03/2007 15:49

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Re: CF+Harddisk Hybrid.. - 15/03/2007 23:48

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Re: CF empeg - 01/04/2007 21:20

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Re: CF empeg - 02/04/2007 15:27

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Re: CF empeg - 02/04/2007 23:57

Re: CF empeg - 05/04/2007 10:01

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Re: CF empeg - 06/04/2007 00:26

Re: CF empeg - 06/04/2007 00:29