F Series CF card HDD replacement is possible! Success story...

[roebeet]

My 120 HDD went into a recent S series purchase, so my next F series mod attempt was a CF card replacement. What I used:

1- F20 chassis (better for my test, since the back cover is thinner)

2- Dealextreme Adapter, here: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.10886

3- 8GB Lexar 133x CF card. I bought it at Adorama, during one of their recent sales.

Additional: I had to use a recent Rockbox bootloader to support CF cards, found here:
http://download.rockbox.org/bootload...at/FWIMG01.DAT, and a recent build (11/30/08 Simple build worked). The 2007 RB bootloader gave me the dreaded "ATA -80" error. I also had to bend the jumper on the adapter, to get it to fit in a F20 chassis.

Lastly, some helpings of electrical tape to avoid any shorts throught the exposed electronics. So far, I've tested playing back music and the PictureFlow demo, and they both work. Seems a bit faster, since you don't have to wait for the drive to spin up, anymore.

EDIT: Two days of testing - also used the video player extensively. No issues, so far. The HDD lag I was used to dealing with is completely gone, now. Also, the unit is significantly lighter (I have a identical unit, with a HDD installed, to compare with).

Cheers, Brian.

[CrowdAds]

[scharkalvin]

I modified an F10 Gigabeat with a similar CF to 50pin IDE adapter. I soldered a wire jumper on the back of the board in place of the case jumper on the pins and also cut the pins down because the back of the player was hard to close. I used a generic OEM 32GB 150X flash card found on ebay. (Blue label and reported to contain Samsung memory parts. Was $66 when I bought it.) So far, it seems to work OK, but it is taking longer to shut down than before with the HD. Nice to have a light thin player with 30GB storage!