[dr408517]

That's very interesting to know (crikey, four 1Tb cards must cost a humungous amount! I suspect you are the first to try this). I was wondering if there was any upper limit due to the hardware (as I've reached about 1.5Tb myself).

Does it show the full capacity if you don't restore the ipod the normal iTunes way but just format it from within windows? That's not a usable solution, obviously, though if it worked to that extent, you might be able to install rockbox (perhaps using the old emcore method?), which might give a clue as to what might be going on. Would be sort-of-usable, except you'd be stuck syncing with rockbox, with all the disk error problems that involves, so until they fix rockbox's ata driver that wouldn't be a real solution.

Is it any different with a 5th gen?

Wouldn't surprise me if there were a limit with the Tarkan adaptor.

Oh, also windows device-manager or disk-manager can sometimes 'see' a more complete disk capacity than explorer does. Is there any difference in this case?

I didn’t try a 5G, but I seriously doubt it would make a difference. RockBox and the Tarkan adapters make it possible to reach such large capacities.

 

[dr408517]

Im betting youre at the limitation of the hardware, and software.

Win7 will only recognize up to ~2TB max on HD size, with Win 10 recognizing 16TB. It has to do with the hard drive sector format. I seriously doubt the Apple & Tarkan parts can support the required 4k sector to get beyond 2TB. Even my FiiO M6 stops at 2TB storage space, id bet for the same reason.

https://www.minitool.com/partition-disk/win-10-max-drive-size.html

I bet you are right

 

[ThinWalls]

The storage limit on the 6G can easily be overcome by reformatting after an iTunes restore. ITunes limits the 6G to 128GB, but if you then install RockBox, then reformat and recopy the RockBox directories you and exceed the iTunes imposed limit. 7G classics will format all the way up to what ever you’ve installed as memory without the limit, with the caveat of the limit I just observed with the Quad and 4TB.

I’ve built four 2Tb iPods now. Three are built with the Tarkan Quad, and one with a Tarkan dual. I use PNY and Sandisk SD cards. I’ve wanted to try to build a 4T for several years now, it was just too expensive.

Yea, I get that with the 6G, but, unless I'm missing something, if you do it that way you can't then dual boot, so can't use OF for syncing, and hence have to deal with disk corruption issues. For that reason I stick with 7G or 5G.

Are you saying though that this 1.7Tb limit kicks in even if you reformat with windows? Also, does device manager/disk manager also fail to see the full 4Tb, or is it just that explorer can't see it? I've had devices where explorer refused to see the full capacity but it was there in device manager.

A final thought is that Rockbox has some ability to deal with multiple partitions, but I have a feeling that that capability is either incomplete or has suffered some kind of code-rot, over the years. That might eventually offer a way past a 2Tb barrier.

 

[reptillikus]

You can format the drive, but it will only make the partition so big (~1.6TB), with the rest being unallocated data. You can make a second partition on the drive, which is great if you want to reclaim some of the space, but youll be limited to ~550 GB. The rest will be untouchable. This is based on my experience using Aomei on a Win7 machine.

Edit: attached a pic



Edit Edit: Dont make fun of my hodge-podge PC!

 

[dr408517]

Yea, I get that with the 6G, but, unless I'm missing something, if you do it that way you can't then dual boot, so can't use OF for syncing, and hence have to deal with disk corruption issues. For that reason I stick with 7G or 5G.

Are you saying though that this 1.7Tb limit kicks in even if you reformat with windows? Also, does device manager/disk manager also fail to see the full 4Tb, or is it just that explorer can't see it? I've had devices where explorer refused to see the full capacity but it was there in device manager.

A final thought is that Rockbox has some ability to deal with multiple partitions, but I have a feeling that that capability is either incomplete or has suffered some kind of code-rot, over the years. That might eventually offer a way past a 2Tb barrier.

Yes, I sacrifice the dual boot feature, but all in pursuit of maximum storage (!) I’ve had very few disc corruption issues.

The limit is present when I try to reformat in Windows. I didn’t check the device manager but when I attempt to reformat with AOMEI there is nothing additional to capture. So i assume the same would be true in the device manager.

Separate partitions might be great, but I can’t even see the other memory to partition it.

 

[reptillikus]

Yeah I have a 6th gen, 400GB micro SD in an iflash quad running RB and find it to be quite reliable. Use it every day, rarely have an issue with it.

 

[ThinWalls]

Yes, I sacrifice the dual boot feature, but all in pursuit of maximum storage (!) I’ve had very few disc corruption issues.

The limit is present when I try to reformat in Windows. I didn’t check the device manager but when I attempt to reformat with AOMEI there is nothing additional to capture. So i assume the same would be true in the device manager.

Separate partitions might be great, but I can’t even see the other memory to partition it.

Oh well. Maybe there's a way round it (by means of partitions, perhaps together with something akin to the old emcore approach that let you format the space from the device itself?) but as there's no way I can afford that kind of card capacity at current prices I'm certainly not going to be contributing to figuring it out!

 

[ThinWalls]

Does anyone know whether it's, even in theory, possible to get round this sort of file system limitation by means of multiple partitions? I'm not sure, at a general level, how that works. I remember Windows 98 had a hard drive size limit that multiple-partitions couldn't get round.

Either way it would presumably require some major work to Rockbox, which probably wouldn't be forthcoming as too few people would be interested (damn those smartphones and music-as-a-service)

Perhaps the 2Tb limit marks the coming end of the road for ipod modding?

 

[reptillikus]

I have never tried building an iPod with multiple partitions before. At it's most basic form, RB is a file browser. I wonder if it's possible that it will access two partitions on the same device. You'll still never get to 4TB, win7 won't let you format the drive to use all that space.

I have enough parts laying around to build another iPod, I suppose I could try it, see what happens.

 

[ThinWalls]

There is specific code in Rockbox to deal with multiple volumes, but obviously I'm not any kind of rockbox dev, and my understanding is that feature is not really complete or foolproof.

And I'm just unclear whether the limitation of the hardware (firmware?) that causes the limitation is such that getting round it would require rockbox to do far more than it presently does, in terms of replacing all the disk-handling stuff. Clearly if the computer can't even 'see' the full space to partition it, the only way it might be done is for rockbox to incorporate some sort of disk management that runs on the device itself. Emcore used to have that menu that let you format the data area, I was thinking something along those lines, sort of like a partition editor for ipods.

In any case, it's very useful to be forewarned that there's not much chance of being able to go beyond approx 2TB, before I am tempted to spend any money on higher capacity sd cards. So thanks to dr408517 for discovering that.

 

[mueslitoeter]

Separate partitions might be great, but I can’t even see the other memory to partition it.

2TB is the maximum capacity for SDXC cards: https://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2520/~/sd/sdhc/sdxc-specifications-and-compatibility
A third party software or linux might help to create two partitions of 2TB. Rockbox can deal with multiple partitions, when HAVE_MULTIVOLUME is enabled in the code, but I think it is not enabled for the iPod6G: https://github.com/Rockbox/rockbox/blob/master/firmware/export/config/ipod6g.h
When partioning the SD card in my Cowon D2, I had the problem, that only the active partiton of the card was recognized by Windows 7. Don't know if Windows 10 can see multiple partitions on a SD card.

 

[dr408517]

Well, I tried the 5G (Even though I was already convinced this was a limit imposed outside the iPod). It failed.

I wondered if my cards might be counterfeit. I installed them in two separate iPods, one 7G and one 6G. I successfully loaded the 7G to about 1.6T and the 6G is loading now and is over the 1T mark. The cards appear to be fine.

My goal was to find the limit, and thanks to the informed comments of this forum, I feel confident the 2T limit is it.

All in all, I am pleased (though slightly poorer), because with this knowledge I will avoid doing this again

Also, I have never filled a 2T iPod, so there’s that.

 

[mueslitoeter]

My goal was to find the limit, and thanks to the informed comments of this forum, I feel confident the 2T limit is it..

When SDUC cards are available you could have 128TB.

 

[ThinWalls]

When SDUC cards are available you could have 128TB.

They would first have to add exFAT support to Rockbox though. Which doesn't seem like it would be impossible (someone said exFAT is an open-source kind of thing).

But would that solve the problem or is the limit more fundamental to the hardware (ipod or iflash) rather than just the FAT32 limit? I have no idea, perhaps Tarkan would know about that question?

Incidentally, when googling for information about this I stumbled on this bit of modding work (nothing at all to do with me, don't know if the creator has ever been on this thread?)

The guy was a little bit ahead of his time - presumably if he'd tried anything larger than 2Tb he would have run into this problem?

https://www.instructables.com/id/I-Sore-2000GB-2tb-Ipod/

 

[alissa914]

Im betting youre at the limitation of the hardware, and software.

Win7 will only recognize up to ~2TB max on HD size, with Win 10 recognizing 16TB. It has to do with the hard drive sector format. I seriously doubt the Apple & Tarkan parts can support the required 4k sector to get beyond 2TB. Even my FiiO M6 stops at 2TB storage space, id bet for the same reason.

https://www.minitool.com/partition-disk/win-10-max-drive-size.html

Isn't the other limit the fact that FAT32 maxes out at 2TB at 16kB clusters? Even so, HFS+ shouldn't have this limit, right? So if you have a Mac and can format it in Mac format, it seems like you can go over 2TB up to 16TB since the partition limit would be the same as with Windows (16TB), but they don't have the file system limitation that Windows FAT32 does?

If they formatted the iPod as NTFS, I would've thought you could exceed 2TB even with MBR if sector size is 4kB each instead of 512 bytes.

But then, I don't have a Mac handy to confirm this. It seems that you're all referring to Windows where we know the limit is mostly due to the file system. If you can use Mac > 2TB, it wouldn't work in Windows since Windows would force you to format as FAT32 even if you have a read/write driver in Windows.