Recently, my trusty old iRiver H120 has been running low on space. It had finally got to the point where if I wanted to put a new album onto it, I would have to delete one that was already there. So clearly it was time for an upgrade.

However, replacing the player would be difficult. Quite aside from the fact that I don’t have a huge amount of money, I am aware of no currently available DAPs that are able to replicate all the things I like about the iRiver. It supports Ogg/Vorbis audio, mounts as a standard USB mass storage device and has superb sound quality. In addition, with Rockbox alternative firmware, it has support for gapless playback and excellent playlist controls. I don’t know of any players with comparable capacity that can equal it.

Of course, the alternative to getting a new player would be to mod the existing one. But getting a new hard disk that fits would be tricky. A few years ago Toshiba promised a new 1.8″ single platter drive with 40GB capacity but they never materialised and now Toshiba, along with the rest of the market, have gone over to ZIF connectors (rather than 50-pin ATA) for their 1.8″ drives. Although adaptors are available, fitting them into the already snug H120 was not going to be easy.

However, there remained one solution. Flash memory is getting increasingly capacious, and although ATA solid-state disks are still prohibitively expensive, it is now possible to get a 32GiB Compact Flash card for no more than the price of a 1.8″ hard disk. With a handy adaptor, such a disk could be the answer to my disk space worries, and according to the Rockbox Wiki, CF card Mods are possible.

Accordingly, last week I ordered a 32GiB CF card, along with this adaptor. The adaptor arrived on Friday, but I had to wait until today for the card. I started by putting the firmware onto the card by putting it into a card reader, then opened up the player, took out the hard disk and put the card and adaptor in its place. Before closing up the case, I turned the player on, which booted happily. Satisfied that this mod would work, I turned it off, took the CF card out, put the hard disk back in, and closed the player up again.

I then set about transferring the data from the iRiver’s hard disk to the CF card. This naturally took some time, and I had to leave for morris practice before it was done. Upon returning home, however, the files had all copied across, so I was able to open up the player and put the card and adaptor back in and close it up again.

So now, rather than having a 20GB internal hard disk, my DAP has 32GiB of solid-state storage, which should draw less power from the battery than the old disk did, not to mention running silently (not that the hard disk made a lot of noise either, of course). It is also a bit lighter; just enough that it feels strangely insubstantial somehow.

Doubtless I will fill this new card up eventually, but hopefully by then 64GiB (or more) CF cards will be widely available and sensibly priced.

The only downside is that the stock firmware no longer works. But I’ve happily been using Rockbox for years now, so that isn’t really any great loss.