Why no love for the Toshiba Gigabeat F series
Jun 19, 2008 at 11:19 PM Post #16 of 33
Will the 10 and 20 take any laptop HDD's though? If so, that should be more than adequate.
 
Jun 19, 2008 at 11:29 PM Post #17 of 33
you can replace the hard disk to CF.
 
Jun 19, 2008 at 11:33 PM Post #18 of 33
Flash memory? That could be cool I guess, but I think I'd rather have larger capacity...
 
Jun 19, 2008 at 11:55 PM Post #19 of 33
Proud owner of a Rockbox'd F60 here. Would anyone have links or info on upgrading to 100gb+ hd's by any chance? I've found that I've slowly approached full capacity (FLAC user) and I'd definitely be interested in 'upgrading'.
 
Jun 20, 2008 at 1:21 AM Post #20 of 33
I bought the Toshiba F40 about 2.5 years ago new for about $220. I really liked the screen brightness and the crisp large album art. Rockbox wasn't available for it at the time, and believe me, without it, the player really suffered. You had two options for syncing the player: WMP10 or Toshiba's own software. WMP syncing sucked before WMP11 came out, but the Toshiba software was even worse; in terms of functionality, it was fine, but it would transfer data at USB 1.1 speeds, compared to WMP10, which would do it at USB 2.0. Total catch-22, as it was hard enough to transfer anything back in the days of WMP 10.

I persevered with it for roughly 1.5 years, because the audio quality was really good. But in 2007, I switched to a Meizu M6L, and never looked back...until it got stolen at the Dubai airport 6 months later
frown.gif
. Ironically, I ended up getting Toshiba's new Media Center based flash player, the T400, which was similar to the M6 in a lot of ways. I'm still using it, as it's an excellent player, probably the only one Toshiba ever got right.
 
Jun 20, 2008 at 3:16 AM Post #21 of 33
F40 owner, here (about a year now, care of fleaBay). I also find the SQ to be quite good, although my D2 sounds better, at least to my ears. I also have a F10 that I use as a backup / parts.

The F10/F20's do have a thinner back, as the drives they came with are 5mm. The F40/F60's have 8mm drives. btw, these are the older 50 pin Toshiba drives, similar to the iPod 4G players. To use a newer 80GB+ ZIF drive, you'd need a converter and a bit of luck (I have yet to get this to work, myself). Rockbox.org link for instructions:

ZIFToATAAdapter < Main < TWiki

EDIT: I'm going to retract my "D2 is better than Gigabeat F" statement. After playing around with the numerous Rockbox EQ settings again, it's really a tough call. It really depends on which set of cans I'm using.
 
Jun 20, 2008 at 4:29 AM Post #22 of 33
That is what you get for living in a different time zone...
A bunch of new posts and no way to reply in a timely manner...

Okay, so the F10/F20 can only be upgraded to max 30GB because of the harddisk thickness. The one platter HDDs are 5 mm and the two-platter disks (40 GB and above) are 8mm.

Which is a shame, since the F10/20 is available in a dark color scheme that I like better then the silver only for the F40.

As for using a CF with the F10/F20 I have tried that and so far it does not work
mad.gif

The 32GB CF worked perfectly fine in a ipod mini, but in the Gigabeat it gets corrupted within a few hours...
I am still researching that, though.

Updating the Gigabeat F40 to a Zif HDD is a matter of about 5 minutes (the second or third time around...).
The adapter is available from ESSkabel (ADA-HDD-1.8-ZIF-CF).

It is not a 100% perfect fit, but I have used one Gigabeat with it for about two month now in daily use.

It is especially good to hear that I am not the only one liking the SQ
wink.gif
 
Jun 20, 2008 at 4:43 AM Post #23 of 33
Thanks for the tip mapstec. I found a similar type adapter which I will pull the trigger on and give it a shot. And I totally agree with regard to SQ...none of the other players I have sound as good straight out the unit. Too bad about the CF issues though, it works great in my iRiver h120.
 
Jun 20, 2008 at 5:00 AM Post #24 of 33
ZIF-adapter: There is another adapter available on **bay, this one does NOT work.

Well, it might work, but you can not close the player anymore...

The good old German adapter from ESSkabel is quite steep (35€=54$), but it works, and works well.
 
Jul 15, 2008 at 3:37 AM Post #25 of 33
I successfully got my F40 to use a 60GB Toshiba ZIF drive (MK6008GAH). I bought my original ZIF adapter from DealExtreme (DealExtreme: $4.63 ZIF to 1.8-inch Bilateral IDE Hard Drive Converter), but I couldn't get it to work. However, I bought a second adapter from the same location, and that one worked like a charm! Been running it for several days now, with no issues - I did get the case to close, but it was very tight.

I guess it's just a crapshoot when buying an adapter that's so cheap. Looking forward to eventually making my F40 an F80, once I pony up the cash for a bigger drive.
 
Jul 15, 2008 at 4:33 AM Post #26 of 33
Because it's Windows only?
 
Jul 19, 2008 at 1:45 AM Post #29 of 33
Quote:

Originally Posted by faichiu /img/forum/go_quote.gif
you can replace the hard disk to CF.


Is the CF card connector the same as the hard disk (microdrive?) connector?

If so, then once you replace the HDD with CF card, how do you install the initial firmware or OS on the new CF?

TIA for any replies.
 
Jul 19, 2008 at 4:36 AM Post #30 of 33
The Gigabeat's firmware is very easy to setup - basically, make a backup copy of the entire GBSYSTEM folder (and the .rockbox folder, assuming you're using that), and then transfer it to another FAT32 formatted disk.

I haven't tried a CF card yet, but assuming it can work, you should be able to format the card via a card reader, copy over the needed files, then insert the CF card + adapter into the Gigabeat. I read that not all CF cards will work, so keep that in mind.
 
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