Extending the Capacity of Creative Nomad IIc MP3 Players?

A not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "I recently bought a second hand Creative Nomad IIc. I've since found that it is a good little MP3 player, with one slight exception: it's lack of memory. Sixty-four megs of memory was good, but with the 10 and 20 GIG players out now it's a little lacking. Plus, being Canadian has it's downside: with the new 'tax' being applied to anything that can store music (another reference, here), MP3 players are set to double in price. Being the kind of person I am, I'd rather try upgrading my current MP3 player then buy a new one. Are there any ways to attach a laptop hard drive to my Nomad? Are there any Smart Media > IDE converters I could use? Is there any information on how to make one myself?"

You can't. Don't waste your time trying.

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, what are you talking about? A Nomad II doesn't have a hard disk. As the original poster said, it uses Smart Media memory. He wanted to know about adding a hard disk to it via a theoretical SM=>IDE adapter.

As for adapters, I've never heard of any. IIRC Smart Media's pinout is the same as an ATA drive or something like that, so it should be possible if you knew the pinouts. Even if you made one, I doubt the firmware was designed with hard drives in mind, so you can forget about battery life. Most HD-based players use 4 AAs (I believe the Nomad II has 2AAAs, not nearly enough, so you'd need to add more batteries for the HD), and they only spin up the HD every few minutes to read data into a 8-32MB buffer, leaving it off most of the time to save on batteries. The Nomad probably just streams the data straight off its memory card, no buffering, which would mean if you hooked up a SM>IDE adapter + hard drive in place of the memory card, it would be reading off the HD all the time. I don't think I have to tell you that that's a Bad Thing(TM) for batteries.

So to add a laptop hard drive to a Nomad II, you'd have to first find or make an IDE adapter for the smart media slot. Then find a way to attach the adapter and drive (which is about the same size of a Nomad and twice the weight) to the Nomad. Then find a way to attach a large car battery to the thing to power the hard drive for more than ten minutes. Or chain yourself to the wall with an AC adapter.

I'd just recommend getting a Nomad Jukebox (that's the one with a HD, not the II, and upgrading the HD is fairly easy to do), Archos Jukebox (a bit smaller than the Nomad Jukebox, but still not really pocketable like the Nomad II), or a used/refurbished iPod (MUCH smaller and lighter than the other two, though you'll probably pay $100+ more for that luxury). MP3-CD players are also an option, if you don't mind burning a new disc every time you change your playlist or want to add a new song, and having only 700MB of music at a time.

Hacking a solid-state memory mp3 player to be a fragile, bulky, battery-eating piece of crap just isn't worth it. There's just no way to do it elegantly and still keep it portable.

Re:Drive Upgrades

[biglig2]

Reverse engineering etc. may not even be necessary; I've seen mods where people just use a sector copy program to copy the beginning of the existing drive to a newer, high capacity one.

A correction re: Ipods; they use a real IDE laptop hard drive, not PCMCIA; what differs from other players is that they use the new smaller 1.8" laptop drives rather than the more usual 2.5" drives.

I'd suggest anyone planning to upgrade a hard disk one stick witha 2.5" model anyhow, as these come in bigger capacities; IBM, for example, have a 60Gb Travelstar. Over 40 days of music, that should last you. ;-)

Re:Power

[gl4ss]

... look out of the window, do some checking.

ipod has hd, archos has hd, nomad has.. theres a freakin swarm of products out there that have harddrive.

http://www.chipmunk.nl/iPod/ [chipmunk.nl] for a picture of opened ipod, that quite normal pcmcia hd look like flash to you?

Re:Power

[bailey34]

What exactly do you mean by "power aware". I don't know about the other HD MP3 players, but the iPod spins down its hard drive, after it has filled its memory (32 MB IIRC). Seems fairly power aware.

I'm assuming this is fairly standard practice.

Re:You can't. Don't waste your time trying.

[zztzed]

IIRC Smart Media's pinout is the same as an ATA drive or something like that

Actually, no. That's CompactFlash you're thinking of. SmartMedia looks like this [thinkcp.com]. There is a floppy disk adapter for SmartMedia, called FlashPath [smartdisk.com], but that's rather irrelevant here...

Re:Power

[ivan256]

THey also have specially written software and a memory buffer so that the hard drive is powered down most of the time. They don't just run the hard drive like it's a flash card.

nomad?

[TREETOP]

smartmedia cards keep dropping in price. Wallyworld has a 512MB card for under 120 US$

Re:iPod

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh...I bought this for $5 second hand. Research wasn't required. Creativity, now though, is.

Smart Cards are not very smart

[Chris Canfield]

In case the other poster didn't bring it up, you can find updated drivers for the nomad IIc here [nomadworld.com], which will allow you to use 128 MB smart cards (if you can't already), which can be had for $40 [pricewatch.com] or less.

The problem with going any further is that the driver for smartcards has to be on the device. Compact Flash cards have the driver on the card itself. It is a trivial matter to put in a 5 GB CF microdrive in CF 2 devices from 8 years ago, but it is impossible to use any particular smart media card unless the manufacturer has specifically programmed the device to be able to handle it. So unless you are willing to program the firmware for either the device or the recepticle, you probably aren't going to find what you are looking for*.

Of course, if you do, please keep us posted. We've got a few somewhat useless Rio PMP 300's that would love to be PMPed out.

Sorry, I've been saving that pun for years.

-C

*It's extremely unlikely, but theoretically possible, that you may be able to connect an IDE controller in place of the smart card controller, but I really doubt it.