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Subject: Re: Q re ipod 5.5g w/ large disks, was Rockbox 3.7.1, released!

Re: Q re ipod 5.5g w/ large disks, was Rockbox 3.7.1, released!

From: Nicholas Gerstenberger <dracodos_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 08:45:24 -0700

>You shouldn't have to do this unless the drive's firmware is broken. The
>reason that exists in the first place is because the original 80GB drive
>in the iPod Video is broken, and fails to emulate unaligned sector
>accesses as is required by the ATA specification.

>If this is really needed for your drive then this is surprising, but not
>impossible; Toshiba managed to make a drive that was broken:)

>What does it actually do when you try using a standard build?

>4KB is the largest sector size currently in use by the drive industry;
>this may change in the future.

When i use a standard build i get: *PANIC* Unsupported physical sector size: 4096
Note this was with a post 3.7 build, but before 3.7.1

I did a lil google searching and thats how I found out about modifying that one line in the source for that type of error.

>There is; it requires more memory (admittedly, not a great deal). Other
>players do not have the software emulation feature*at all*, so changing
>it to a larger value for the Video does not solve the problem for any
>other player; they will all fail in the same way with that disk. Fixing
>it for*those* devices would take significantly more memory and have a
>small performance impact on all drives... the ipod video has just
>already taken this impact by necessity.

>At the time I added support for large drives to the standard builds, we
>were not aware of any drives with broken firmware other than the
>original 80GB ipod video drive. You are the first person to report a
>drive having an issue, so I don't think it's worth increasing it at this
>point.

>The people on the forums who used to have to increase it don't need to
>any more, because I improved the emulation code to only operate if the
>drive actually requires it and no other drives do.

I guess it's safe to say the 80GB Toshiba drive isn't the only one now :) I can see your point, if i'm the only one so far that has used this combo of an iPod Video 5.5G, 120Gb Hitachi 3600rpm, Rockbox within the past 2-3yrs that drive has been arounnd it's also safe to say i'm in the minority Might be useful to add this drive and this info under the "1.8 Drive Comparison" section of the *HardDriveReplacement* page in the wiki though :)

I for one have not noticed any difference in performance between the 30gb and the 120gb i have now, besides the obvious slower access which is the drive, not Rockbox.

Thanks for the enlightned explanation :)

//



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Received on 2010-12-22

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