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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.
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
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
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
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."
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.)
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.
You think he might have put some larger images on the site so that people could follow along with his mod...
The Kingston drive is cool kit and nicely priced, but its PCMCIA not CFII.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
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
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.
This drive is PC Card sized, which is not usable in any modern consumer digital camera. The seller was simply keyword spamming. "Microdrive" is actually a marketing name created by IBM (and then sold to Hitachi) for a hard drive with a CompactFlash interface, so neither this auction nor the Seagate drive can be legally called a Microdrive.
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."