A music playing app should be able to work with or without extra hardware. I don't think anything we've thought up would preclude such an app from approval.

A third-party music playing app would use (to start) the music stored on the iOS device itself. It would provide a better UI than the built-in music player app and could do so in a couple of modes, depending on the usage scenario. Hand-held (normal) mode and in-car mode are two pretty basic choices.

I believe someone already has hardware out or coming out that allows you to access external storage. There are a number of ways to attack this, from directly connected USB dongle to WiFI (I'm not sure if BT is possible given what's availabe in the BT stack in iOS). That would provide the secondary source of music where the app would manage its own database.

I wouldn't be ready to commit financially if I didn't see an opportunity for healthy return just with a new third party music player that could only play music already on the iOS device. The other stuff is a bonus and any hardware is a great markup opportunity.

Oh, and to tell you the truth, I'd kind of hope for a rejection at some point. It could make for a nice PR piece which can really build momentum for an app. There are a number of examples in the app store that would not be anywhere near as successful as they are now were it not for the PR generated by initial or update rejections. I think it's pretty obvious at this time what does and doesn't get you rejected from the store.

I'll come back and delete this comment and its Google cache should I ever find myself in a situation where I have an app about to be rejected.

Hi,

[ Archeon says....

(...)
and opted to order a WD 1TB Laptop drive for the Empeg.
(...)

I suppose those don't come as IDE anymore? So I'm guessing you're using some kind of SATA to IDE converter? Which one if I may ask? How do you fit that into the empeg? (the secondary drive bay most likely?) .....




That's correct. It looks like everyone's going to top out on 320GB for IDE/PATA. One objective I have is to help see if I can get a reliable SATA interface working for all of us. I think someone else has tried it, asked about it, never heard back what happened.


******** If someone else has done this, please let the community know of your success or what you found out. *********


The last time, Mark Lord made it possible for us to go beyond the 132GB threshold with his wizardry. At this point, the maximum drive size of 320GB is driven by the manufacturer's marketing of PATA drives, not player capability.

I may need Mark's help on this one too. If there is hardware stuff, that needs to be debugged, I can provide that. At least the upper boundary of the player software has been expanded in the last go at this, so it allows for larger drives. It can handle at least 640GB now. I know it works on 500GB, I have several players with dual WD 250GB drives that have been working great for quite some time now. I expect that player memory may be the big problem now with the expanded playlist files & caching. Luckily, with v508 Mark restructured the block size (now 4k), to make more efficient use of disk and memory space, but I may besurprised by something else. I am also leary of the emplode and jemplode, I think I am having problems with that now because it is taking a very long time to build such large databases and I think we may run up against some punt timer somewhere (because no one in their right mind would ever exceed 60GB of drive space, right <grin>). If that occurs, I think I will be screwed, although Roger and Mark have helped me out on that one recently. There are a lot of things to consider and can go wrong with this kind of venture.


Yes, I am using an IDE to SATA adapter. At this point it is an older one. I don't think I will have problems with the on-board power supply (which could bite me). I'm hoping with the adapter and just one drive (the drive draws <1 Amp @ +5V, 1.7W max.), I won't have a problem. Older drives used to suck a lot more current at spin-up. Each 250GB drive in there now draws 1 Amp, 2.5W each, I should be okay.

When I get a working configuration, I will try to test it with a few adapters and publish the information. As soon as we go SATA, I think we'll only get one drive. I think we lose dual drive address capability, not sure about that though. That's one of the reasons why I'm starting with a large (1TB) drive. I doubt that I will ever need more than 1TB of capacity at this point.


I plan to work out some kind of mounting arrangement for the drive and the adapter (or universal mounting method for adapters). This could be interesting since most of these adapters attach directly to the drive connector for Signal Integrity and other reasons. I may have to orient the drive differently in the player, or use extension cabling (I haven't seen short ones), for one side or the other, maybe mount the adapter under the drive tray, etc. Drive re-orientation may require some analysis for X/Y/Z intertia with the existing player shelf isolation design. The drives are 12.5mm high which may dictate some of those mounting compromises.


As soon as I get on my way, I will probably open a new thread to document the process and provide feedback/get-help/crash & burn/look-stupid/etc. I have 10 players (mostly Mk2a, a few Mk2 - less memory 12MB vs 16MB, may limit Mk2 applicability), that I can use for development/regression testing efforts, so when I'm done, hopefully, it should be good for the community.

Ross

"...(because no one in their right mind would ever exceed 60GB 1 TB of drive space, right <grin>)"



tanstaafl.

Gee, I don't know quite how to respond to that one. I'm not easily tongue-tied. <grin>

Ross

What audio output options are there from the 'iDevices' direct to an amp? 3.5mm TRS?

On the dock connector there's 1v RMS line out, plus it will stream digitally over USB too as long as you identify as a suitably blessed accessory.

Technically you can do generic "whatever you want" BT accessories (ideal for a remote empeg front panel), but they too have to be iAP blessed. I think the wakemate wristband falls into that category.

Are iDevices easily accessed as "mass storage" in some form or another, or does that also require the blessings of Job ?

No mass storage access. Not without rooting/hacking anyway.

Is there a jailbreak hack that adds proper USB mass storage? (I hadn't seen one) And does it do any FS translation, or just present the HFS+ filesystem as is?

I wonder which interface the Numark / Akai Digital DJ decks were using then?

And ditto for the iTunes-style interfaces used in (?)Rhythmbox et al. ?

I thought I'd read something about some JB install that would allow you to mount the filesystem as a drive, but I don't know how it works. I've got SSH active for use with the filesystem and currently I'm happy with SFTP over WiFi.

I did just find one program "USB Drive" which allows you to create virtual drives that work as mass storage, but I don't think it shows the rest of the filesystem. It's not the program I'd read about before.

The regular iPods like in the photo are USB mass storage. Its just the iPod touch, iPad and iPhone that need the special USB mux driver and apps that talk over it.

If your app knows how to then it can talk to the Apple File Connection service for limited access to the media area of iPod touches, iPads and iPhones.

Reviving this old thread again... and a question for Mark.
The price of the 3TB drives has now dropped to an acceptable price point (for me that is) of 125 euro/drive.

For that price, I can buy either the WD30EZRSDTL or the WD30EZRX. The only difference I can see is the WD30EZRSDTL uses a 3Gb/s interface and the WD30EZRX a 6Gb/s interface.

Now, logic would dictate that I would choose the WD30EZRX over the WD30EZRSDTL because of the faster interface, especially at the same price. BUT... I'm wondering if this disk is just as good as the other one. And mostly, my current motherboard does not have a 6Gb/s interface (but my next one will, no doubt, and I like being future-proof if the choice is there).

Can I use this 6Gb/s interface drive without a problem on a 3Gb/s motherboard? Is there any danger in using the drive like this? (data loss?) Or should I just buy the 3Gb/s version and be done with it?

Either drive is probably as good as the other. The 6gb/sec doesn't matter at all --> sure it will make reading/writing the on-drive memory buffer (aka. "cache") faster, but you'll never be able to see/measure it in real life.

The drives themselves are maxed out over a 1.5gb/sec SATA-1 link, so no need to go all googley-eyed over 6gb/sec for mechanical media.

The 6gb/sec SATA link is being brought out for SSDs, which actually do need it to achieve maximum speeds.

As for the drives, dunno. All I have here are 2TB and 1.5TB Green drives, still working well.

Cheers

Oh, I believe the most recent 2TB WD Green drive that I purchased was of the 6gb/sec variety. One benefit I found with it, compared to the older 3gb/sec stock, is that the 6gb/sec model correctly identifies itself to the operating system as a 4KB hard sectored drive.

That's useful for Linux, as it saves having to do manual partitioning to achieve 4KB alignment. The partitioning tools can automatically do that since they now see the real characteristics of the drive.

Cheers

The 6gb/sec 2TB drive I have here has been trouble-free on both controllers (Intel and JMicron) of the 3gb/sec motherboard I use it with.

Thanks a lot Mark! The 6Gb/s version it is!

Update. I ended up buying the 3Gb/s version anyway since, as it turned out, the 3Gb/s version comes with a necessary (for me) HBA SATA controller card included. The 6Gb/s version however, does not.

Since it seems it's still not possible to connect drives larger than 2TB directly to any Intel southbridge controller (in my case, the most recent one: ICH-10R) and use it in ACHI mode, I decided to go with the 3Gb/s model.

The order has been placed. Is it normal to be excited about the upcoming arrival of a new harddrive?

That must be a MS-Windows restriction. We don't have that restriction with Linux.

Cheers

There are two different limitations that come into play when going above 2TB:

1. The old MBR setup caps out at ~2TB. This is what commonly causes problems on the OS side unless the user has switched to GUID based partitioning.

2. LBA addressing is also capped at ~2TB with older Command Descriptor Block size. While drives are switching to 4k sectors, this is an on platter change only, the downstream pieces still talk in 512bytes per address for compatibility reasons. CDB was previously limited to 10 bytes, with 4 bytes of that dedicated to the LBA. 4 byte LBA address (4,294,967,296) * 512 byte sectors = LBA address limit capped at ~2.1TB.

The fix for #2 is to shift to Long LBA, which at a minimum doubles the LBA address block to 8 bytes.

More info from Seagate here.

SATA drives, such as the 3TB WD unit being discussed here, don't use SCSI CDBs. They use SATA FISs, with 48-bit sector addressing. So there is no "2TB limit" for LBA addressing. Ditto for the SATA controllers (Eg. AHCI) as well.

Some OSs might internally use 32-bit numbers to hold LBAs, in which case those OSs could suffer from a 2TB "barrier".

There are still BIOS boot issues and partition table concerns, but those wouldn't be unique to "AHCI mode" versus "non-AHCI mode".

Cheers

From what I understand, it's a (Windows) driver issue with the Intel Southbridge. As it seems, in IDE legacy mode, the entire available space of the 3TB drive is show in partitioning programs (after making the drive a GPT drive). In AHCI mode, only 700+ something GB's are shown. Intel has not come up with a driver update for AHCI modus, I don't know why. AMD's SB850 southbridge which is used on their most recent motherboards does not have this issue. And neither has the Marvell 88SE9025 SATA600-controller, which is also often used on motherboards as away to offer more than the standard 6 SATA channels. It's this Marvell controller that is bundled with the 3TB WD drive (the 3Gb/s version), on a Highpoint RocketRAID 62x controller card.

So it seems it's a (windows) driver issue, which of course is why Linux does not experience this problem. And because this Intel ICH controller is probably the one that is used on 80% (or more) of the motherboards out there, Western Digital has opted to include an alternative controller card with this drive.

Ahh, right, my head is still somewhat planted in the enterprise storage world, where the CDB limit was being hit on some RAID setups a while back. It also comes into play with certain SATA devices attached to SAS controllers.

I never changed my idle park timeout and my drives are showing ~330k LCC. My WD10EADS is showing approximately the same powered hours (~10k) but only 29 LCC.

First question(s), is 330k bad? What will happen because this number is high? I'm going to change the park time in the next few minutes, but have I already gone wrong?

Second, is the fact WD10EADS only shows 29 an indicator that something is wrong? Should it be higher?

Thanks

WD originally spec'd the head-parking mechanics at 300,000 cycles (minimum). When they heard that their screwed-up firmware was causing that count to be hit in mere months, they changed the spec to 1,000,000 cycles (minimum).

I wouldn't want any of my drives to be even in the ballpark of either spec.

The WDIDLE3.EXE-1.05 program is the official way to tweak the drives, and is the way one should use if they can. But if you're really stuck, "hdparm -J" also works (latest version -- sourceforge).

Cheers

It should be higher only if you've been powering the drive on/off regularly. If instead the drive is in a 24/7 server and never powered off, then the could should be really low, in the same order as the number of power/reset cycles.

Not all WD drives do the "constant head parking" silliness.

Cheers

Dragging up this thread yet again...

I am looking at replacing the 1TB Samsung drives in my Synology NAS with 2TB WD20EARX drives (non-RAID). Do these drives need the idle timer altered or has WD seen the light on this by now?

Also, will the advanced format cause issues? I will be formatting them as ext4.

I was going to look at more Samsung drives until I read this
which kind of put me off....

Dunno about that specific model, but I have 3 WD30EZRXs in my Synology NAS, and they need the idle timer to be tweaked. The Synology firmware actually does it for you in the latest releases, which is rather nice.

I think the idle timer is basically a feature of all of the green drives.

Yeah, you'll probably want to tweak the idle timer on those -- I did on the one I have here.

Ext4 will be very happy on the 4KB physical sectors (aka. "advanced format", yeah, right).

Just partition with a recent fdisk/gdisk/gparted/whatever so that it aligns the first partition to begin on a multiple of 8 sectors (4KB).

Cheers

Thank you for the replies Tony & Mark.

Tony, it looks as if they brought in a feature to disable the idle timer from DSM3.2-1922 onwards so I will have to upgrade (no big deal) - thanks for the heads-up!

Mark, I will be using the Synology NAS OS to do the formatting/partitioning so hopefully, being a recent version of Linux, it should be 4K 'aware' - is this likely? Can I check this (eg. via the terminal)?