Posted by Daniel James on 10/02/05 11:48

In article news:<1128177931.866577.146360@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
wrote:
> My question is: Do i need to put in the exact same model hard drive?

You can do, or you can upgrade.

The thing to beware of is that 1.8" hard drives come in several different
thicknesses: 5mm and 8mm are common, but some are 9.5mm. The thicker drives
use two platters to achieve higher capacities.

The H120 takes a 5mm single-platter drive, and you can upgrade it to 30GiB
by installing a 5mm 30GiB drive (and 40GiB single-platter drives will be
coming soon). You can, apparently, remove some of the padding that protects
the hard drive in the H120 and install an 8mm drive, but I'm not at all
sure that that is a good idea.

> it seems to be formatted with fat32 so i assume it should just be a case
> of popping the new drive in there. I called iRiver but the support guy
> couldn't tell me any more than it was a toshiba drive.

Yes, iRiver seem to use Toshiba drives. The disk in my H340 is a Toshiba
MK4004GAH (8mm, 2-platter). It's formatted as an LBA FAT32 volume. The
iRiver should be able to format a new disk for you, but if not then you
should be able to format it in any DOS/Windows/linux/whatever PC.

The main obstacle to upgrading an iRiver in this way is the cost of a new
drive - especially the larger capacity drives - but the cost is falling
(you can now get a 20GiB 1.8" drive for only about twice the cost of a 3.5"
40GiB drive). As you have an iRiver with a failing drive this would seem to
be the ideal time to experiment.

Cheers,
Daniel.

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