Well, today started a sale at Office Depot for I/O Majic 40 gb 1.8 inch hard drives. My instant thought was "upgrade." This was not met without some hesitation, though. I really don’t want to drop $100 on this drive and find no use to it. I don’t really need another external hard drive. I have 120 gb PATA drive sitting in a static bag on a shelf that I could stick in a drive box if i needed the space. This means it was time to research.
Ok, well I started by trying to find out what actually was inside of those boxes. What brand? I wasn’t terribly concerned with its brand, but I did want to know about it’s connector. If it was a standard connector, I could just open the case (hopefully by removing screws… or just cracking the damn thing open) and disconnect it. I might be able to hook up my current 20 gb one to that connector and make it a standard external if I was lucky even. But finding out that it was directly sodered on would mean that I was out $100 and probably just broke my external too. That would suck, to be blunt. Well, I can’t seem to locate anyone who actually cracked one open to tell me any of this. Ok, so maybe I could find out the brand of the hard drive. If I know a brand, it has to be to the brand’s socket. So I’m looking around and notice something. First, no one will tell me. Then I notice that Hitachi and Toshiba have different connectors (found this out when I saw 2 different adapters for 1.8 inch hard drives). Oh crap, this is suddenly more important. So I go to look a bit more into everything that this could be. My iAudio M3 (as I expect all of them) contains a Toshiba MK2004GL. That happens to have a 2mb cache and be 5 mm high. Great, so what difference does that make? Well, the cache is unimportant. It’s the height. When looking at the Toshiba hard drives (since I highly doubt that the 40 gb version would use a Hitachi. They would have to have a different socket and more), I see that the only 40 gb 1.8 inch harddrive they make is the MK4004GAH (take a look at this list to see all of their hard drives. Both mentioned are listed.). That is the obvious choice. But this one is GAH, not GL. What gives? It’s a different style that, most importantly in our case, is 8mm high, not 5. That’s 3 mm different. If you look inside one of these things (or just outside, really), you will realize there isn’t 3 mm spare. But there is a 40 gb version… that is in a larger case. It’s listed in the specs of them on iAudio’s site. This means that there is very little chance of being able to upgrade the hard drive, if any. It won’t fit in the case. the connector might not be positioned on the new hard drive in such a way that you can make it even connect to the connector. So, I’m probably going to either buy a Creative one and stick a large hdd in it (something with a 2.5 inch hard drive) or maybe an Archos since Rockbox runs on them so well.
Two little other updates: I found that the DC adapter for the M3 has a 2.35 mm OD with positive in the center. This was because I was looking through old cell phone car adapters to see if any would work. They don’t. But Radioshack does sell a A style (that’s the correct style: 2.35 mm open end) universal tip and a bit of cable to soder into another cable (like an old cell phone charger) that would cost about $8 for that.. plus tax and shipping. I also found I could order an official one for $18.
I also have been working on a web interface for Azureus (that functions through an independant web server) that can search also. isohunt isn’t playing nice at the moment though, so I have to rewrite it.