I was wondering how big of a disk drive you can use for an empeg mark2a.
I first thought about using 2 ide 120gb drives. I then saw a cf device where I can use 2 flash drives in one drive bay. I could use a flash drive of 128g and another one with 128g. I use very high bitrates on my audio files and use FLACs. Does anyone have any idea. Also what would effect the size of drive I can use. Example: number of songs, song list, quality of files, tag info, etc.

thanks

There are other threads here somewhere (10yrs ago?) discussing/implementing stuff like this. I think the general result was that, for a Mk2a RioCar branded player (has more RAM), up to 240GB combined storage was doable.

The limitations are in the memory required for the data structures which are used by the player software to manage LARGE numbers of audio files.

In your case, perhaps you don't have an insanely large collection, but the individual files are quite huge. That should be less of an issue.

The dual-CF adapters ($5-$15 on Amazon) do work, with one card as Master and the other as Slave (fully automatic, that bit).

Sticking to 128GB max per drive is not required if always using Hijack kernels, but going beyond 240GB or so is probably going to cause more memory issues.

There is now a "combined" bigdisk builder image available, that installs Hijack, partitions 1 or 2 drives, and installs player software v2.01 onto the setup, all in one step.

I expect to be further improving that builder image over the next week or two, to help more with larger drives (beyond 64GB or so). Stay tuned to the SSD threads in the Technical discussion area of these forums.

Cheers


Cheers

Mark, thanks so much for this information. Can you elaborate on what memory issues will occur if a drive goes beyond 240GB? And how does that relate to using a two-disk configuration versus a one-disk configuration? In other words, two smaller disks less than 240GB each, versus one large disk of greater than 240GB? And also, would there be a difference if it were winchesters or if it were CF cards?

For the purposes of my question, I'm temporarily setting aside the issues with the song database and the number of tunes being indexed. For example, let's say that the drive was intended to be filled with FLAC files, which will be individually very large, so the user wouldn't likely hit the ceiling of the number of songs. Let's concern ourselves with the disks' ability to be recognized by the player, correctly built, and correctly store their files via emplode.

I'm asking because, in email, Mr_Maniacal was asking me about this, and I told him to hit up the experts on a BBS thread. My suggestion was to stick with a single disk configuration instead of going for dual drives, if possible. But if, say, a single 512GB CF card would be a problem, I'm interested to know what the issues would be.

It sounds like it's more of an issue of loading the database/playlist/metadata into volatile memory and caching, etc, more than the amount of disk space. There are upgraded units with up to 64mb of memory out there, so I'm not sure how that would affect things. There's some old threads out there with a long detailed discussion on this. EDIT: My search-fu is weak though...I can't seem to find one.

Purely sem-informed speculation here: Larger drives require more kernel memory for bookkeeping and whatnot. And based on previous BBS discussions, I don't believe anyone has tried to go beyond a pair of 120GB drives yet, mainly because larger ones probably weren't affordable before now.

A would expect a single larger drive would be easier on RAM than a pair of smaller drives, as only one mount point and associated data structures would need to be maintained.

One will definitely need to format for 4096-byte block sizes as well, which my builder_v21 does NOT currently do. Some of the older bigdisk builders do it though, and I'm likely to update v21 with that feature at some point as well (currently still travelling).

For the player software, it's all about the number of tracks, not the individual track sizes. And I believe there's a hard limit of less than (approx) 60000 tracks due to FID numbering and bookkeeping.

We did cover all of this at one point, probably more than 10 years ago now!

Cheers

So, to confirm what I'm hearing:

Regarding disk drive building and storage:
Your guess is that a single 512GB CF card would be easier on RAM than, say, two 256GB CF cards, but that no one has reported trying a disk that big yet. And also, anyone attempting it should wait for a new version of your bigdisk builder.

Regarding song database size:
In the past we had determined that the player software could handle a database of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 songs, depending on how much data existed in the songs' tags.

Does that sound right?

Well I guess I will wait and see what I should do. I will buy a cf, but I just dont really know what size I should buy at the moment. If I should buy one large drive to reduce problems and in the future with software upgrades see if the empeg can accommodate greater drive space. So get a 128g or a 256g.

I thought the practical FID limit was more like 40000 tracks/playlists or something, but yeah. If we could find/link the older threads for this it would help I think.

EDIT: At least one person reported 37000 working FIDS after applying various hacks (eg. fidsift.sh etc..).

I am searching the BBS for some of the older threads relevant to the SSD/CF discussions here.

First up, this fascinating thread from 2007, when many of us first starting replacing spinning rust with CF cards:

https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/317823/1 "CF empeg"

And various others..

https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/357267/1 "Player crash when uploading playlists"
https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/250953 "Patching the Player for more dynamic FIDs"
https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/287390/1 "Plain english description of what the "maxfid" patch does?"
https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/248680/ "empeg file structures"
https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/306495/ "Large harddisk upgrade, many songs, 2 questions"
https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/306417 "250 GB Drives" and the beginnings of the bigdisk builder

EDIT: Wow, read through those threads and there's a virtual gold mine of useful info. Not to mention a reminder that I need to also incorporate the set_max_fid stuff into the new builder images along with fidsift.sh (easy, just gotta do it).


[more to come]

I meant without having to do hacks, i.e., merely run emplode and drop songs into it.

Cool links to the various threads with all the info. Thanks so much for the information, and thanks so much for keeping the builder images updated with new features which keep our old players working with new drives!

Added to the list above, thanks.

Thanks for those links. I will look those up.

That's another excellent link, this time dealing with the ReserveCache=xx setting and other items. Including a reminder for me to add "nocheck" to the rwm script that the bigdisk builder installs. Done (not released yet).

Cheers

https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/287449/fpart/1 "Plain english description of what the "maxfid" patch does?"

https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/183410/all/fidsift_sh_rearrange_drive_fid "fidsift.sh -- rearrange /drive?/fids/ into subdirs"

I was looking at a compact flash adapter from ide to hold two flash drives, a master and a slave. It looks average price for 128gb is $79 to $99. i am wondering if you could use another adapter that fits a micro sd card into a flash drive because a 128gb is $25 a 256gb is $48 and a 400gb is $95. Those micro sd cards are much cheaper than a regular flash drive. I am wondering if something prevents that or what the downside would be

CompactFlash is better for the empeg than SD, as discussed in some other threads on this BBS.

Reason: CompactFlash drives are IDE drives (technically they have a PATA interface), and they talk directly to IDE PATA controllers (like the one in the empeg) without having to go through any kind of translation. So a CF-to-IDE adapter does not have any complex conversion firmware which could potentially have bugs. Whereas an SD-to-IDE adapter would require a layer of firmware between the SD card and the IDE controller, potentially having bugs and compatibility issues.

I don't know if anyone has had success with an SD-to-IDE adapter yet, whereas more than one person has had success with a CF-to-IDE adapter.

Yeah. Two of us have recently tried out very similar SD-Card to IDE44 adapter boards. The one I got works with SD cards up to 16GB, but fails with a 64GB card. I don't have a 32GB to try with it, but theoretically it probably would work.

BBS user JBjorgen had no success with a 1GB or 32GB test card:

https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/371821/Replacement_SSD?#Post371821

Cheers

Mark, what was the brand/model of the 16GB card you got it to work with?

I have had this card for a long time, so probably no longer available:

Silicon Power SDHC Class-10 16GB.
S616G1208
TFSKOM1201517

So, SDHC rather than SDXC.

what I am saying use the ide to cf card and using a cf card convertor that would hold the mini sd card. like they have the mini sd cards that fit into the larger sd card. Would that work? or are there problems with that that i am not understanding? if not is there a type one cf that is 256gb?

It will only work if the CF-SD card converter makes the SF card look like the flavour of IDE that the empeg needs it to. The Empeg is a lot more fussy about what sort of emulated IDE it will work with.

To expand on what Andy said... Whether you use a single adapter of:

SD->IDE

Or you use two adapters of:

SD->CF->IDE

Either way it doesn't fix the problem of SD adapters not having a good track record so far. Adding that extra layer isn't going to magically solve any issues with SD adapters. And right now, no one is reporting any good success with any SD adapter.

Your best bets for disk drive replacements on an empeg are still:

- Actual spinning-platters IDE PATA drives, which is what the player was designed to use in the first place.
- If you're dead set on solid state, then a CF card (via a simple CF-to-IDE adapter) has a good chance of working.

Or one of those Transcend SSD drives with an IDE SSD interface.

well someone gave me these two links for a cf to ide
and the flash card.

they are for ide to cf flash: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0036DDXUM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

for the card itself: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NUB2TWI/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

i hope the above link is the correct compact flash drive that will work with the ide to dual cf one master spot one slave spot

Yes, that adapter and card are working successfully for me. In your case, since you want to use FLAC files, I'd say go for a bigger CF card of a similarly reputable brand. From the information in this thread, you should be able to go up to 256 or 512 on the flash card. And go for a single card, not two, if you can. That will simplify things immensely.

(And the card must be CompactFlash aka CF, there is another kind of card called CFast which looks similar but will not fit and will not work in an empeg.)

ok thanks

by the way, they have many different CF memory cards and I want to make sure I get the right kind. Do you know of one that is 256 or 512 gb. I have seen CF type B if that is the same thing. Prices seem to vary widely.

I don't have any recent experience with newer CF cards, but if you stick with name brand they'll probably be fine. Sandisk, Lexar.

Many of my own empegs have no-name or A-Data CF cards in them from more than 10 years ago.

So, look for a "CF" type card (not CFexpress, not CFast, not XQD), and stay at 128GB or less. Anything larger will be troublesome for the empeg with its limited RAM.

The largest sandisk I could find in a regular CF was 128 gb. The adapter has a master and a slave slot. Tony said it would be wise to use one card instead of 2. I have high quality mp3(bit rate of at least 320 or flacs, I may try and use some WAVs. All which use a lot of hard drive memory, but use less song names to use less file indexing. I figured buying a 256 gb card, which seems to be hard to find unless its a type B Compact Flash, which has larger dimensions. I think I found a lexor that is 256 gb though. I am still looking. If you know of any please let me know.

A pair of 128s should theoretically work, as long as the master/slave thing functions correctly on the IDE connector.

The reason to recommend one drive rather than two is that one drive is simpler than two, it simplifies some of the steps and reduces chances for things going wrong with the installation.

Is a CF and IDE adapter still the recommended way to go? I have a spare 60G SSD (SATA) and an IDE adapter I had been considering swapping in, but after finding this thread it sounds like picking up a 128G CF and an adapter might be a less problematic solution. I would have already tried the SSD, though I misplaced my null modem cable in my move west, so now waiting for one of those to be delivered, so reading while I wait and wondering if I need more items to make this a success. This is what I'm considering:

SanDisk Extreme 128GB CF (SDCFXS-128G-A46)

and then either,
This adapter with straight thru IDE header
or
This adapter with up turned IDE header

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Goal is to maximize space and then never have to mess with storage again. I like that the second adapter has mounting holes that perhaps could be used for securing it, but wasn't sure if the orientation of the header would be an issue. I have some 3M VHB tape which should work for mounting either.

UPDATE: Third choice for adapter (as mentioned earlier). Has this one been confirmed to work well? <-- Looks like Tony is already confirming he has this and it works, so I'm leaning toward getting this one and a single 128GB SanDisk CF.
Dual CF to IDE adapter

Yes.


Unfortunately, SATA won't work, even with a fancy adapter.


I think that's the one in my "Daily driver" empeg and it's been working well. The other two might work fine too, but they don't have any "support" around the casing of the CF card, so vibrations will wiggle the card. I liked that Syba one because it was shaped exactly like an IDE drive and so it mounted perfectly into the spot inside the empeg. (though it takes up more physical space than is strictly needed.)