With my empeg throwing several IDE errors at my desk, usually preceded by a hard drive struggling to spin up, I'd like to convert my unit to one using CompactFlash cards. Anyone else done this recently, and have any tips or gotchas that came up?

My main plan is to go with 2 32GB cards, to just outright replace the 2 30GB drives my unit currently has installed. This should be simple enough with the converters on the market.

Thinking ahead though, is there a solution that works inside an empeg to allow 4 cards some how? The current price jump between 32GB and 64GB is still sizable enough that it would be nice to be able to use 4 32GB cards, allowing for some growth.

i'd also like to hear what people have to say on this: at 4 cards, this would become viable for me, but i'd need 4 64s to hold my whole collection!

Nope. Instead, I put in a 64GB Transcend PATA SSD.

Looks like my research is going to speed up a bit here, since the second 30GB drive finally gave out yesterday.

The one dual CF to single IDE converter I found is this guy, but the reviews, and information in it are poor at best. I'm guessing it's a solution if I wanted 2 cards, with one in the slave, and the other in the master position. That wouldn't get me to 4 cards in the empeg though, since the one adaptor would consume the IDE bus.

Sourcing the parts locally appears to be out now, with the Frys shelf showing an empty slot for the one adaptor they carried (just a normal 1 to 1 converter) with no ETA on a restock.

I ran through the old long CF thread to try and find any useful info for now. Much like a few others in the long thread, I've found plenty of dual CF to IDE adaptors, but they all appear to present the two cards as a master and slave device. None, including the one I linked to earlier with the plastic shell appear to do RAID0 on their own. And I'm not quite adventurous enough to try what russell did to get 4 cards onto the one IDE bus.

Bitt linked to this, and it seems like a potential alternate solution, as this would allow 8 total MicroSD cards to be installed into an empeg easily. Problem is, I can't find a place to buy them from, nor any confirmation on if it actually works in IDE mode. I'll try and contact them to see if they can answer the IDE question before I spend more time trying to buy one. If it supports 32GB MicroSD cards, that could allow 128GB in one drive slot far cheeper then a 128GB CF card.

It's interesting to read about your endeavors and I'm glad you're posting. I'm sure many people are thinking along the same lines- how to economically get a reasonably sized SSD in the empeg.

You've inspired me to attack an older machine and trade out the tired 3.5" drive for an 40-IDE-to-CF adapter. 8GB UDMA should be enough for a Win2k box meant for surfing. I know the hardware isn't up to snuff anymore, but the experiments with an SSD-based Win2k install intrigue me. I guess I'm doing it more for that fun than anything else.

I had no luck tracking down the Photofast CR-7200. It's looking more and more like it was vaporware.

I did try to contact the manufacturer, and ask about a different product, but never heard back. The one place that listed it for sale has no ETA on having stock, and couldn't confirm they ever had any.

I had briefly looked into the other Photofast solutions that are more hard drive form factor with multiple card slots, but decided against that route as none were 2.5 inch IDE form factor. To get the empeg going again, I've bought two Sybia adaptors from Microcenter, and 2 CF cards are on their way now.

I may still peruse alternatives for empeg #2 later. The idea would be to have empeg #1 in the car, and #2 at work for music. May set up something to keep both in sync somehow, but this is all long term idle time projects that I may not get to. I do like the general idea of converting both to solid state storage.

Did anyone ever try out one of those IDE-SATA adapters in combination with a 2.5" SATA SSD?

This is the route I'd like to take. I'd just wait for prices on a big SATA SSD to come down.
With my luck, though, they'll come down after the wildly successful introduction of a different memory technology based on microscopic bits of whale blubber or something.

Still working on this, once I finally found time to install the adaptors, a flaw was discovered. The particular models I found indicated slave support when I looked at them in the store. Unfortunately it looks like the PCB is shared with a dual slot converter, and they put the slave jumper on both. The back side has pads for a second CF slot, and the adaptor does nothing when it's jumped to slave mode. Time to settle on an online adaptor and have it shipped since I have 2 good 32GB cards in hand.

Hi,

Not very good luck with those that have the JMocron chip or the Marvell Chip (Addonics sells these).

I have only been trying to use 2.5 inch SATA Laptop disk drives. Doesn't matter what size of drive. The problems run from not being able to converse with Emplode to walking over the Ethernet Controller configuration data, to DOA.

Don't know what the SSDs will do...

Good Luck,

Ross

I've gotta be honest here, even though I'm the one mostly responsible for emplode -- it's a bit flaky. I'd drop down to the FTP/HTTP stuff built into Hijack for file transfers at this point.

Or possibly try JEmplode...

...which uses Hijack if it's available, but has its own particular flavour of flakiness.

Yeah. Here, I've reverted to using emplode (from within a VM) rather than Jemplode, because Jemplode just is too flaky and empeg syncs are already time-consuming enough without that added flavouring.

Cheers

Hi,

My latest shot at this was to purchase an inexpensive ($50.00 USD), computer today with Linux (Linux Mint), installed on it. The system has 2 SATA ports, 2 IDE ports, a 2.4GHz Intel Celeron, and 2GB RAM - enough infrastructure (I think), to carry out the task. I had them install the Linux onto a WD 1TB SATA 3.5 inch drive I had as a spare. The 1TB OS drive is on SATA 0.

A while ago, I used FTP to load all of the FIDS from a dual 250GB drive Empeg system into a directory of another 1TB SATA WD 3.5" drive. Since the FIDS are just a continuation from hda to hdc, the FIDS appear as a flat file system. So, the whole directory is contiguous FIDS.

Next, I will install the FIDS drive onto the Linux SATA port 1 temporarilly and copy the FIDS to a directory on the 1TB OS disk. At that point, a FIDS file structure will now be on the OS drive. I will then remove the FIDS drive from SATA Port 1.

If that works, I will prep a 1TB Laptop drive in the Empeg using the JMicron IDE-to-SATA converter. These work just fine for anything local to the Empeg player. The Marvell chip will prep the drive fine, but you lose Ethernet controller.

Next, I will copy the FIDS from the OS drive to the prepped 1TB Laptop drive. Then I will install the 1TB drive into an Empeg with the JMicron SATA-to-IDE Converter and invoke a commanded database rebuild, to link the database together and fix the Tags.

At this point I haven't seen the player have a problem playing the music database once the database is loaded and the Tags rebuilt. So, this has some chance of working.

If this works, I think I saw a program to make DOS files into FIDS. If that is so, I might be able to build a FIDS database outside of Emplode and load a full database onto the drive through the Linux system.


After you have had a chance to stop laughing, tell me where and why it appears that I need to just stop and play with my fingers and toes contently instead of this stuff.

Crazy, probably. But it's grtown to become a hobby of mine.

Thanks,

Ross

I have to say mp3tofid + rsync makes things soooo much easier...

Ordered one of these (Syba Best Connectivity 2.5" IDE 44-pin to Dual Compact Flash Adapter) and verified it works great for the empeg. Plugged both cards in, attached the cable, and it just worked. The form factor is also perfect for mounting directly onto the hard drive carrier with no modifications needed.

The adaptor doesn't do anything special to try and combine the two flash cards into one virtual drive though, so this isn't a solution to add 4 CF cards to a Mark 2 unit. With the Mark 1, this would be a great way to go though cheaply.

Oh, and Mark, just for you

"cp /dev/hda /dev/hdc"

None of that fancy dd stuff here.

Letting the empeg clone my old drive right onto the CF card #1 now. Will clone the second card when this finishes. With 30GB to copy, I'm guessing this is a measured in days operation.

Curious if you're using anything special for the copy task.

I like this thing-
http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29

Nothing special. Just the normal unix "cp" command running directly on the empeg to copy one hard drive device to the other. Once it's done, I'll adjust the last partition boundary to take advantage of the ~2 extra gigs the CF card has over the old spinning disk. Cloning the second disk to the second CF card might be a little more hairy, as thats the disk that was starting to fail. It seems to be a spinup issue though, and once it's up, it remained stable for a number of days.

Since I'm in no rush, and I lack easy access to a machine with IDE, this was the easiest method for me.

Hi,

Just an FYI...

If you use the cat /dev/hda > /dev/hdc command using the Empeg alone, it takes around 2.5 days each to copy a 250GB Drive. That's 5 days of time for a 500GB file system, but it does work.

Once again, it points to the stability of the hardware design to be able to do this for a continuous time and not have it panic or croak.

Good work guys!

Ross

Which is why I used rsync between the two disks the last time I did this (HDD -> SSD). It might be slower (overall), but it meant that I could deal with interrupting it if necessary. I was also merging two disks down to one, which was a consideration as well.

Oops, no root FS on the second drive like I had thought there was. Guess I did that on one of my older units. Time to find an IDE system at work I can use to finish the clone.

Forgot to run time on the cp command, but it finished up sometime overnight.

Hi Tom,

What size is the drive you were copying from and to? I was curious how the relationship of disk latency related to the read and write operations of both drives. Theoretically, the SSD would have little to no latency compared to a rotational media drive.

This might be the case if the code has wait states for timing or was expected to be processing the next queue to write during rotational latency time.

Just curious.

Ross

The source is 2 30GB IDE drives (the factory drives for this unit), and the destination is 2 32GB 133x rated Compact Flash cards.

Using a USB to IDE adaptor, I was able to make a disk image of the second 30GB drive in 53 minutes, with the tool reporting a speed of 9,417,974 bytes/second. The temporary space for the disk image was an internal SSD. Writing back out using the same USB to IDE converter is a bit slower, with a disk monitor showing ~1.79MB/s write rate. Took 4 and a half hours to write out the 30gb image.

Now the drives are in the empeg, and it worked just fine the first boot. My playlist position is exactly where I left off, and now I can seal the unit back up and start preparing for it to return to use in the car.

That's awesome! Good work!

Ditto!

Ross

cat (treating it as a char device) is likely to be a lot slower than the nearest dd bs=512 equivalent. A dd with bs=1M is likely to be fairly optimal (no memory pressure and a good tradeoff), but I've never experimented

Hardware really should be that stable! If it fell over after a week of constant transfer I'd still consider it flaky...

Hi,

Next time I could try the dd copy. The block size of 1Meg should speed things up.

Thanks,

Ross

The device is a block device, regardless of the program opening/reading from it.

cat uses 32KB buffers by default in such situations.
The kernel reads a maximum of about 64KB at a time from IDE drives.

Cheers