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Rio Carbon MP3 Has A 5G CF To Be Cannibalized
GlucoPilot writes "This guy bought a Rio Carbon Mp3 player because he figured he could rip the 5GB CF Card out of it. He did, and put it in his prosumer 6MP digital camera. Now he can take 1,500 six-megapixel pics in one sitting. Oy." The card is apparently a 5GB Microdrive, note, not 5GB of Flash memory.
that's a lot of porn
They've always been nice to us, supporting open standards like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.
I'm surprised we haven't seen those microdrives in camcorders yet. I wonder why?
Also, I'm glad they didn't copy Apple in this respect -- after all, if I were Rio I wouldn't care what my customers did after I bought it, since I would have already been paid.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
1,500 pictures in one sitting? I hope he cannibalized the battery too!
I don't see why this is making news now. Those of us with the high end digital SLR and such have been doing this since we first found out you could get these CF cards in these players. It's cheaper to buy the player and canblize it for the CF than to buy the CF.
Waste of a good player if you ask me.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Was the guy himself a microdrive? Has the microdrive robot takeover begun?
Arbitrary sig
If you search completed items on eBay, a 5GB microdrive went for $96 recently. So this guy wasted $150. The days of buying MP3 players and selling them for their parts are over.
Carbon Cannibal: Breaking it down for the hard drive
As I described yesterday, I bought a very nice MP3 player, the new Rio Carbon 5GB model. It's awesome, and I already like it a lot. My original intent, though, was not to buy an MP3 player to listen to music, but instead to rip apart for its 5GB hard drive, for use in my Nikon D70 digital camera. But once I saw the Carbon, I decided it was time to own an MP3 player, so I got two.
Rather than eating lunch today, I decided I would share my story of destruction. In part two of our saga, I tear into the second of the two Carbons I bought, pictures included.
Note: If you decide to spend $249 on one of these things and tear it apart yourself, you do so at your own risk. It's value to Rio and the store you bought it at will instantly become $0, and your warranty will be a thing of the past. At your own risk, your mileage may vary, do not pass go, please tip your waitress. Oh, and whatever you do, don't come yelling at me. It's your own damn fault. In fact, you will probably end up with $249 worth of useless junk. You have been warned.
Okay, so first of all let me tell you right up front that I broke the thing to the point where I will have to use a little glue to put it back together. The Carbon has a metal back plate, and a plastic front plate, with a rubber surround. What I did not realize is that the front plate is in sections, as well. Not realizing this, I didn't remove the front plastic facing (the silver plastic with the LCD window and the Rio logo) from the body of the MP3 player. It is held in place with some adhesive. Just be careful while you remove it and it will come right off. Once off, it may be that there is a better way to get this thing apart than the method I used. If I will have to use some glue inside where it used to have screws holding things together, because I broke a few plastic threads on the plastic case where the screws were attached as I pried it apart.
While it looks from the outside like the rubber portion is a section all on it's own, it in fact is not. The rubber part is just glued to the plastic front plate, which is under the silver plastic front cover just mentioned.
How I got it apart (your mileage may vary, be careful): I started by working a small screwdriver around the case, prying very gently between the metal back plate and the rubberized section. There are a number of metal tabs that you will see inside as you go. Those hod the drive in place. Be careful and don't go too deep or apply too much pressure inside with your screwdriver, you will break things if you do, or you might crack the case. If you don't care about reusing the Carbon, you can afford to be a little more indiscriminate, but things are packed together pretty tight in the small case, so caution and taking one's time is warranted.
Once I worked all the way around with the small screwdrivers (I used 2, it helped keep things working along), I peeked inside to become a little bit familiar (there's a lot you just cannot see, though). Then I used a screwdriver inserted from the bottom of the case to get good leverage as pictured below, and worked the case looser.
In the end, I used my fingers, after loosening with the screwdriver, to take the case apart. Again, note that I broke the plastic threaded screw posts in the process. The end result was a front plate, a loose power button (just insert it back in place later), the top chrome-like trim plate (that has the holes in it for USB, earphones, etc), and the back plate with all the electronics attached. The front panel navigation button is loose when you disassemble it - it's held in place by the front plate.
There are two screws that you will need to remove from the face of the circuit board (the side with the LCD screen), and then you can start to swing the circuit board away from the hard drive. Below is the view from the side, pulling the circuit board up and away from the battery (lower left) and hard drive (in the lower center of the picture under t
But I don't get it. Why would they want to redesign it? Won't they sell more the way it is now, since both the people that want to play music and the people who want the hard drive are buying?
Also, there's the other side of it: what if somebody wanted the shell? The thing that upsets me about the iPod Mini is that I want an iPod (to sync with my iBook), but I want a flash-based player. I would have loved to buy an iPod Mini shell off Ebay after somebody else took the hard drive, but NOOOO, Apple had to go screw it up!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Don't really buy that 1,500 picture number, but it is in the right range. I have a 2.2GB Microdrive in my 5 Megapixel camera and can only shoot 550-600 pics. But really, how often do you need that many pics? I have shot a couple hundred when using the autodrive a lot, but I could cull those down in the field if I started running short on space. The problem with CF hard drives is they are a LOT slower than flash on playback, so wading through the contents is not fun.
Democrat delenda est
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=5gb+microdrive &btnG=Search+Froogle
its about $180 for a 5G drive with some sort of warranty
It's nice to get a 5G 'memory card' for just $250. But does this microdrive suck the battery faster than regular flash memory card? This is quite an important issue because - as far as I know - digicams and batteries 'hate each other'.
-- yeah, i know, my english sucks
... Blame it on Rio!
No, that was the Creative Muvo something-or-other, and it was a 4GB drive, not 5.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I wish anyone that has tried this with a Rio Carbon or more specifically the iPod mini - do you get better battery life with a compact flash card in these things?
And to note... I recently spoke with someone at Hitachi. They said the MAIN reason the iPod mini is a closed device where you can't just remove the drive easily is solely to protect it's market for the drives otherwise.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
since we are talking cameras, i might as well ask. i have a 2mp camera which takes good pictures, but i am thinking about getting a 3 or 4mp as prices have fallen (paid over $250 for my 2mp 18 months ago). what digi camera's do people have, and how do they like them? my 2mp is fuji, and i have been happy with them. the 2mp takes nice pictures, but a guy at the photohut told me that for anything larger than 4x6, i should get a better camera.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Better yet, mod it up so that a CF card reader slot was put in there, so you could swao out CF cards. So does anyone know if you can do that, and if so, anyone have an mp3 player shell to sell (or better yet donate so I can try and mod it for the saake of the community at large)? :)
Yeah, because more expensive and lower capacity flash memory is better...somehow...
I'm totally baffled.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Ok.. maybe I'm missing something here.. Are these things sold with a mandatory music-download-service subscription or something like that, in order to subsidize the price of the hardware? Or what?
Because if they make their money off selling the things.. that doesn't make sense. Why should they care what you do with their product once they've sold it? This could leads to them selling more units.
(Besides which.. The idea of being 'nice' to a business is just ridiculous. It's a friggin' business venture, not a person! They're in it to make money. If they act 'nice' it's because they believe it's a good strategy to make money. I completely fail to see how that should inspire any loyalties from me.)
Why else would they always put the link in the most useless part of the text? To keep me on my toes? The link does not point to 1,500 six-megapixel pics, so the link text should not be "1,500 six-megapixel pics." The link text should be the "rip the 5GB CF Card out of it."
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The price of Compact Flash really took a nose dive in the last month. You can now get a Sandisk Ultra II 1 GB solid state card for under $100.
Well, in the article the guy said he cracked some of the plastic on his, so it would have to be glued back together, but that if you were careful you could avoid that. So I'm sure if you looked you could get a shell of one of these, or of the Creative Muvo thingy (without the 4GB drive) off Ebay.
However, if you'd want an MP3 player that's designed to use CF cards, there's exactly one(!) company out there that makes them, called Frontier Labs. They make a CF-based player called the NexIA. I've thought about buying one, but I wish it would sync with iTunes...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You think he might have put some larger images on the site so that people could follow along with his mod...
What kind of camera can take 1,500 6 mega pixel pictures without a change of batteries? If you can change batteries, you can change media as well.
I've got a Sony DSC-V1, and I love it. But getting a > 256mb memory stick won't do me too much good without extra batteries.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Does anyone know much about how long these drives are supposed to last? Is there a maximum number of writes, like flash memory, or is it equivalent to a 2.5" hard drive?
I've got a few i-openers and I also want to build a small router type machine out of a soekris board, these drives would be ideal, as long as they aren't going to stop working after a month of writing logs.
Read and write speed is not an issue with what I have in mind.
pretty soon there will be an article about a 6MB drive!
Longer battery life, better shock resistance...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Although they're similar, this isn't an iPod. Apple has nothing to do with it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If they act 'nice' it's because they believe it's a good strategy to make money. I completely fail to see how that should inspire any loyalties from me.
If a company A is more successful than company B because it acts nicer, that will reinforce company A's nice behavior.
If that is what you value in a company AND it's products, since no product exists in a vacuum, then it SHOULD inspire loyalty from you because that is what you pay for. If you DON'T value niceness, then of course it shouldn't inspire loyalty from you.
Some of us happen to like nicer companies than unnice, or even evil, companies, and choose our 'loyalty' accordingly.
Loyalty may be too strong a word, but our proclivities if that seems better to you.
GPL Deconstructed
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/cover age/article/1,1113,2320,00.html
Soon you won't have to buy the MP3 player to get the drive.
"And I'm right. I'm always right, but in this case I'm just a bit more right than I usually am." - Linus Torvalds
You see, every time the spec for something goes up a notch, Slashdot needs to post an article about it, esepcially CPU speeds, as measure in megahertz.
The interesting thing is, I was under the impression that both Creative and Apple have now protected their Microdrives so they're not readable in a camera.
For those who are thinking of doing this, beware, though. I bought a cannibalized microdrive, which worked for about weeks, then died without warning. Now I have no idea how to get the thing fixed.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Anyways, seems like a cheap way to get a very nice mp3 player, that you can scale with larger cards as you a) get more money and b) they get cheaper.
The drive was designed in Singapore and manufactured in China. Seagate, once a California company, is now so multinational they barely have US operations. They've closed plants in Ireland, Mexico, Mayalasia, and Singapore because those places weren't low-cost enough.
Here's the ST1 drive manual. Expect a glut of these things in January, once the holiday season business has been fulfilled and the production lines are running at full speed.
Raw DV has the video and audio streams interleaved.
Some of the DV "container" formats used on PCs (such as one of the two DV-AVI types) duplicate the audio stream, with the "video" stream actually being the original raw DV (which has both video and audio)
Also, longer tapes might exist now. The typical 60-minute-standard-play tapes are 13 GB. I think that tapes exist that are 75 and even 90 minutes in standard mode now though, although last time I went miniDV shopping they were hard to find and VERY expensive. (Compared to 6-packs of 60s relatively cheap at Costco.)
See above regarding extended play tapes, which I think are 18-20 GB or so (but with a MUCH higher risk of errors) on a 60 minute tape.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
But... aren't CF memory cards anywhere from 3 to 5 times slower?
So even though power consumption of a memory card is about 4 times less than a microdrive (305mA write vs 80mA write, but possibly worse since it will only be reading and the flash is still 80mA read), it will be spending about 4 times as long actually reading from the device, too.
And I'm fairly certain that the iPod shuts down the hard drive entirely, rather than having it sit idle, to conserve power. If it doesn't, it could, and considering the new 4G iPod got a 50% power boost over the 3G iPod, with no change in battery, I suspect that's what happened.
So you'd get, I am willing to wager, no increase in battery life, better shock resistance, lower lifetime since they have limited read/write cycles, more expense, and maybe lower weight.
4gb microdrive specs
1gb CF specs
GPL Deconstructed
Cost of Rio MP3 player: $249
Cost of trip to buy Rio: $5
Value of your time to disassemble Rio: $50
Having your hack featured on Slashdot: PRICELESS!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I don't know, maybe Morals?
After all, if people are cannibalizing OnStar systems after the subscription runs out just to get the GPS components, someone ought to be able to suggest a use for the rest of your Rio.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
From what I previously knew, the Rio lost the battle to the entertainment cartel, so it was encumbered with digital restrictions management. I've been holding off buying a portable mp3 player because of the fear of buying one, and then finding out it was useless to play mp3s from my own music collection.
I know that I can take a cd with mp3s on it to a electronics outlet to check if car stereos work or not with non-drm'd mp3s, but the few places I've been to (including circuit city, best buy, and a few other large stores) don't make it possible to check this on portable players, everything is boxed up when you buy it, and the samples are a mess (and I doubt they'd let me make the transfers to the device to see if it worked, though I must admit I haven't tried, haven't been to one of the stores lately).
An ipod is far too expensive for my budget. Can someone name some lower priced mp3 players (ogg is ok too) that can hold a decent amount of songs (at least a hundred), and can play them, and transfer others in and out for variety, without drm restrictions? I'm looking for something hopefully under $100, the lower the better. I'm interested in two types, one that plays a cd of mp3 recorded songs, and one that isn't a cd player. If the second one can use usb drives as the medium for storing music, that would be even better, so I can mix up the music from time to time for my disabled relative who lives 3000 miles away, and doesn't own a computer.
Any ideas, recommendations, suggestions would be deeply appreciated. Thanks!
That and screwdriver claw marks, I'd imagine.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
If that was the case, why doesn't Hitachi just swap a couple pins for their embedded customers. That way it would not be interchangable with the consumer version.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Imagine if Slashdot only posted news once. If I was away for a few weeks, and slashdot posted a really cool article about some obscure subject that's rarely covered by anyone, I would most likely miss out.
Not everyone reads the first article. Quite frankly, I'm glad Slashdot reposts nearly identical articles.
Providing they're not posted the same day.
That would be SWEET!!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Of course it does. Just drop it into a Zaurus or other handheld running Debian. I can imagine using partitions as /usr and /var.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
simple, bceause the manufacture of the microdrive makes money off selling the 5gb md at full retail price so they don't want people buying the player and takeing the drive out instead of buying the full priced version. So they will force rio to change if they still want their microdrives.
thou it depends on who suppiles them.
I had a friend who worked at a Best Buy....he noticed one customer was buying a returning 2-3 hard drives a week complaining about them not working.
Being a tech guy (he worked in their "upgrade department") he popped one of the returned drives into a system and checked it out...worked fine...but was WAY lower capacity than what it was labled.
Turned out the guy was buying the largest drives on the market....then pulling the labels off and putting them back on small drives which he'd return.
Next time he came in the "yellow shirts" where waiting for him and gave a ring to the local police pretty quick.
Now if you paid cash and didn't leave any personal info, only did it once and never returned to the store again....you could probably get away with it...but whether or not you should try that is between you and your deity.
The problem is the kind of greed that makes someone try that kind of scam in the first place almost always assures they won't do it just once - and that's when they get caught.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
On the other hand, you really can't blame them for assuming that you were trying to defraud them. I bet they get this sort of thing a lot, and it's a damn shame that they don't check the returns more carefully.
Of course, that's why I like tamper-proof seals on things. That way you can be relatively sure that no one has had the device before you. I never by "open box" electronics for this very reason--the stores just can't test everything and often are so swamped that they overlook little things, and it's very easy to get screwed.
That's what I was thinking, too, but with a potential for being slashdotted, maybe he was wise to not put bigger images on the page. His site has held up remarkably well.
They dont put those things in because it would drive the cost beyond what the average consumer wants to pay for a basic digital camera.
Want really good zoom? Get a DSLR and a nice lens. The nikon D70's 18-70mm kit lens is worth $500 but only costs a bargain $250 in the kit.
More battery power = bigger battery = bigger camera. Size is a purchase factor for many people.
Most DSLR's can shoot well over 1000 shots between charges and theres no need to turn the camera off. Heck, my D70 *never* turns off completely, even with the switch on Off. It always at least displays the shots remaining on the card.
-
As long as you find nothing wrong with them treating you (the consumer) the same way, then fine. Personally I like to reward companies who see benefit in supporting customers with my business.
If you teach companies that they won't be rewarded for playing nice, they won't. If you send the message (with your $$$) that actually caring might be profitable, they might take that option, even if it's less obvious as a mechanism for making money.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Dude I think your friend is full of bull. The paper the labels are printed on is almost IMPOSSIBLE to get off without tearing it and if you did, that crap rolls up like crazy. Now I can believe that maybe he was taking the face off the hard drive and putting it on the smaller capacity one, but even that would be hard with the screw locations. Just a thought...
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Really, then explain why I have a nice western digital drive here that I've just successfully been able to peel the entire top label from without /any/ damage.
Even the other little stickers seem to come off just fine... the only ones that have severe issues are the "protection" ones that leave behind bits of themselves spelling out "VOID" or somesuch.
We once bought a nice 80gb drive from Future Shop as an "open box" drive... whoever had the drive prior had low-level formatted it to 2gb... and we couldn't find any way to get the other 78gb back... so we returned it, but also told them exactly why we were.
"Apple ipod drives are 'dumber' than your normal 1" microdrive or 1.6" mini-drive. They lack a lot of the logic IC's and firmware that allows them to be used with standard IDE interfaces."
1 023&message=10224662
Well, that's not what mr Tony D says. Read on for more information about how to get your iPod Mini's microdrive up and running in your digital camera.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=
If they make money by helping you, then of course they will help you.
Competition helps. If Canon isn't selling a camera with integrated storage and battery, and it really is a strong selling point, then eventually someone else will and take those sales away from Canon.
As an analogy, look at the iPod, and then the iPod mini, as examples of exactly this formula.
Market is flooded with removable storage, removable battery mp3 players. Apple releases an integrated storage, integrated battery mp3 player which happens to become a big hit. In fact, I do believe the CF hd market was languishing until Apple stepped in.
So yes, if you believe that you make the most money when you help the consumer more than your competitors do, a corporation is out to do BOTH.
GPL Deconstructed
I guess a lot of cameras use stanard AA batteires, mine has a special 'infolithium' doohicky.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
They would want to redesign it if they were hurting thier hard drive suppliers sales. The reason for this is if buying a rio for the hd is cheaper than buying the hd itself then the hd supplier would rethink its discount to rio on the basis that they are losing thier cream of the crop profits on raw hd sales.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Word on the street is that the 5 gig versions of the Seagate ST1 CF drives will be available for under $200 in a month or two. The 2.5 gig versions should be just under $100.
I guess this is cool if you want one early, as the drives have only been made available for OEM uses, but the consumer versions will be cheaper than these devices so it's not a great deal unless you're impatient.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If you are shooting a show, you end up with a lot of images in the buffer (1DII can do 8images/sec). You cannot change card until they are all spooled out. So either you have a big card and shoot your bursts, or you have small cards and need to wait till you have spooled (1-2 mins) until you can change cards. Waiting is not a thing which a professional photographer likes to do, although Java users are a patient lot (glad I got that in:)
This is not a signature.
Ask yourself this: about what this article is? That guy who disassembled that player is actually (probably not intentionaly) advertising Rio brand. Anyone who wants 5GB compact flash will want one. I'm sure there is someone in the /. crowd who will buy it. Heck, even I am interested in it.
Its free advertising, and the positive one.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
I currently use a Fuji too. It is 2 MP as well. Probably the same as yours, the FinePix 2400 Zoom.
It is an OK camera, given that I purchased it 3.5 years ago, and it is still ticking. It has a good lens. The Megapixel thing is not an issue. Its pictures are nice and sharp. It also has great macro capability.
The problem I have with it is low light performance. It can't focus and the pictures are grainy. Flash pictures are really crappy too.
I found that this is a common problem with consumer digital cameras. A relative of mine has bought a high end prosumer camera, the Nikon 5700. It suffers from the same problems of low light performance as well. He also made a mistake of using a microdrive Compact Flash card, and writing to it is very slow.
I have been thinking of my next camera, and find the following choices to be suitable for my need:
Of course, you can take the removable lens DSLR route, but that is too expensive for a general user like me.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Also from the main page "click the pictures to see larger versions"
But... aren't CF memory cards anywhere from 3 to 5 times slower?
In a word, No
High end CF memory cards are 2 to 3 times faster than microdrives.
Of course they can cost up to fourteen thousand dollars for the really big ones
Being an outside maintenance dude, I see this sort of weird pricing with small engines. Say you got a small riding mower needs a new engine. You can get mowers on sale for as little as 600 clams. Want just the engine? 599$. Guess what most guys do....
I say go for it before RIO won't care, they sell more gadgets, they are happy, you get a microdrive and the leftovers for your junk hardware box (or storage unit or whatever), and that's a geek +1 cool factor, because you can never have enough hardware junk. Evah. That's the rules and stuff.
Sounds like the camera doesn't recognize the HFS format on the Ipod Mini's drive. So, he reformatted it as FAT using the Carbon (he could have also formatted the Ipod's with FAT with Itunes for Windows -- if the Ipod hadn't been driven over).
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Actually I'd say that those type of mp3 players are in the minority. The only ones I can think of offhand that convert to their own formats are the RCA Lyra and pretty much any 'mp3' player Sony makes (they all convert music to ATRAC3 format).
everyday is another shooter.
I have several boxes of Microdrives that I never use any more. The main reason is that they only fit in this computer!
;-)
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
cat
That 5 GB drive is equivalent to a DVD. So you could have a camcorder that stores a full hour of high quality MPEG-2 video, or a half an hour of DV-25 (i.e. MiniDV compression) video.
You can use an adaptor
i ve s/
http://www.glasslantern.com/articles/PocketPCDr
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
This was around 95 or so...the labels on the drives being returned were those metalized silver ones. No they didn't pull off completely cleanly and if you looked closely you could tell where they had been pulled up and glued back down (he showed me on that was sitting there.)
No, it wouldn't work with just any drive on the market. But the particular brand and packaging that this guy was scamming on did make it possible.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
You may be able to get that label off with some care and some time without tearing it. But try sticking it back down. It looks like crap. Even with glue, most of the paper they use to print the labels with are made of similar paper like you get on a bottle of soda and that really shows damage.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com