For those considering which CF card to buy...
I started out looking for Sandisk cards (as they have a good reputation) on eBay, but then I noticed that all the sellers who have good prices (compared to retail stores) and do show actual images of what they're selling (not just stock photos) are simply selling
counterfeit CF cards - so then I decided that it would be better to buy a cheap card (the Transcend 133x) from a reputable store (newegg.com). Also, I decided to go with only 133x (as opposed to Transcend's 266x line) because in my testing I've noticed that my iRiver H320 is limited to transferring data at about 11-12 MB/s when either reading from or writing to it (that appeared to be processor limited as the hard drive is
specified to transfer data at up to 31 MB/s, and because most hard drives don't have a flat transfer rate [see just about any review that includes sequential transfer rates at
storagereview.com]), and the Transcend 133x
has been tested to read/write at 34 and 15 MB/s - faster than I am able to transfer data to/from my iRiver's hard drive.
(In testing by copying large files from my iRiver to my PC, I get 10.89 MB/s with the hard drive for 5 GB of data [7m 50s], and 11.76 MB/s with the flash card for 1.84 GB of data [2m 41s]. I haven't done any thorough write tests with the CF card in my iRiver, but it appeared to be getting about 9 MB/s while looking at Task Manager - which admittedly is lower than the 11-12 MB/s I would get while writing to the hard drive. I don't use my iRiver to transfer files between computers so write speed isn't that important, though one interesting thing I have noticed is that while recording with the hard drive it would spend about 6 seconds writing the buffered data to the hard drive [after 2m 28s recording at 16-bit, 44.1KHz, stereo], but with the CompactFlash card it would spend 21 seconds(!) writing data to the card for some odd reason... [it makes less noise on the recording (using an external analog input) when using the CF card, but still...])
Also, as mentioned on the
CFModGuide, if anyone's interested in a different CF adapter which should fit better (as both connectors are on the edges of this adapter rather than one on the top and one on the edge; though it costs more) there's the
PA-CF18T. The Rockbox page only lists the UK seller for this adapter, but there's also
this company which sells it in the US for
$24 (though you have to contact them as you can't buy it from their site). Though as it appears that you guys are doing fine with the
cheap adapter and the H100 iRivers, and as that cheap adapter does fit the H300 series with modification, this is probably only for those of you who want the adapter to fit right in the H320 without having to modify it.
GrandMasterMark, have you seen
this page? I haven't looked at that seller's feedback, but considering how low his feedback score is and how low the price is on the cards he's selling (compare to
this 8 GB 280x professional CF card for $244 from amazon.com) it wouldn't be surprising to find out that your card is either/both not the capacity/speed that you were sold...
Topic: iRiver H120 CF Mod Attempt - Success! (Read 160735 times)