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Music Media Hardware

Mini Drives for Mini-CDs? 56

Posted by Cliff from the mini-me dept.
fist_187 asks: "i'm working on a semi-portable MP3 player project, and would like to include a CD-ROM drive in my setup, but a full size drive is a little bigger than I'd like. so, I thought about using a drive designed for mini-CDs...but I can't find any! I know that there are several MP3 portables that use mini-CDs, but does someone know where to find the drives themselves (preferably in a USB or IDE variety)? The only thing I've been able to find, after some searching, is the Imation RipGO!, but that's already a player... defeating the purpose of building from scratch in the first place. Does anyone have advice on where to look?"
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Mini Drives for Mini-CDs? More

Mini Drives for Mini-CDs?

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  • And the problem is... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Brento ( 26177 ) <brento.brentozar@com> on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @09:23AM (#5439856) Homepage
    Lemme see if I got this right.

    You want to build a product from scratch. While looking for components, you found a inexpensive complete product that meets your needs, available off the shelf, that has too many features for too low of a price.

    And the problem is...?
    • The problem is that he wouldn't be able to ask slashdot if he just bought the damn thing.

    • another problem (Score:2, Insightful)

      by shdragon ( 1797 )
      Isn't the combined size of the molex connector and the ide connector larger than the size of a mini-cd? I doubt you'll find a drive meeting your requirements. The only way I could see this working would be one that used the floppy ide/power connectoions. Of course, creating a cd-rom drive that can only hold less information than it's competition (zip drive) probably wouldn't do very well. But, gook look in your quest.
      • Umh, the new 750M Zip Disks hold more, but that's it...the older 250 only holds ~40M more and the 100M version is certainly smaller...

        It's arguable that anyone would want to spend ~$100 on a 750M Zip setup where the disks cost ~$15 each when you can get a good CD-RW drive for much less (~$70 for a Sony)... that takes 700M disks and works with almost every system built in the last 4 years...

        If you really want the smaller size, you can always get Mini CD-RWs...a pack of 10 will hold a total of ~2G of data and will cost ~$10...

        As far as ruggedness, if you need more than the MINI-CD Jewel Case that comes with it, you can always buy a MINI-CD carrying case (just check out camera stores)...

        And then there's the write speeds...4 minutes to wtite 66M to a 250M Zip disk on the new drives...and it won't even write a 100M disk...
      • A serial-ata drive would be feasible I guess, but probably wicked expensive (or wicked hard to get ;-).
    • I must agree. I feel dumber for having read the original question, so I can't help but think that we're not getting the full story. I must believe that the intended project isn't as stupid as it sounds. Fist_187, please for the sake of my hope in humanity explain to us what exactly you have in mind. Based on the description I really haven't a clue.
      • well, i was really just asking if such products existed... the project itself is another computer-in-car concept, just for fun. the intent is to somehow work the components into the dashboard. here's the reasoning behind it: hard drives are subject to vibration. flash drives have expensive media, and i would need to buy 2 (one for the car, one for me). a regular cd drive would be a little big for the dash. but, the media is cheap and mini cds would be small enough to work into the dashboard.

        if you can think of a better combination of durability, compactness, and low price, let me know...
        • I have run two IDE disk drives (210mb and 13gigs) in my car every day for the last two years and they are absolutely fine. Even driving over the cobbles at the university.

          Just make sure you spin the disks down. I have the expendable 210mb with Linux and custom GPS/Ogg/mp3 software on it and the big music disk is only spun up when necessary.

          If you really want a CDROM, there is a chap on the net who tried using a thirty foot cable to the boot: and it worked. Shove a standard CDROM under the seat.

          Just don't try it with a 15K rpm disk :-)
          • that's good to know. did you mount the hard disks in any special way as a precaution? also, what method do you use for getting your music on and off your 13GB drive?

            one of the advantages for cds (or any interchangeable media) is being able to bring the music collection on the road from home to work and back, and be able to listen to it in all 3 places. i'd consider carrying the hard disk with me, but i'm very prone to dropping things... especially expensive things...
            • I mount the disks vertically so that vibration doesn't affect the reading arm so much. The disks are against a woodne board, separated by a single mouse-mat to provide some vibration damping.

              I have an ethernet port in the car and just run a cable out of a window. Wireless would be easy and cool :-)

              Just remember to spin the disk down as much as possible. Think hdparm -a -m stuff and custom buffer routines. Linux 2.2 and noflushd if necessary.
    • The problem is that he wants to build a product from scratch.

  • 1. 2. 3. (Score:5, Funny)

    by adolf ( 21054 ) <flodadolf@gmail.com> on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @09:43AM (#5439970) Journal
    1. Buy said mini-CD player from Best Buy.

    2. Disassemble; make note of component manufacturers and part numbers. Call said manufacturer(s) for sample(s).

    3. Reassemble. Return unit to Best Buy for a refund.

  • See subject line.

    If you can't reduce the travel distance of the shuttle, why not just live with a slightly long shuttle and make a housing for the lazer in a Mini-CDR format?

  • Dear Slashdot ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @10:38AM (#5440284) Journal
    I'm working on a human transporter capable of carrying 4-6 people and keep them protected from the weather, move them around at speeds up to 70mph. The design is centered around my hopes to use a internal combustion engine - it would use gasoline and have things that go up and down and make a spark and go 'vroom' when you stepped on a pedal inside the passenger compartment, but I can't find any! I know that there are several person 'porters that use engines, but does anybody know where to get engines directly? The only thing I have been able to find is cars by Ford, Chevy, VW, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, etc... but those engines are already in a person mover... defeating the purpose of building from scratch in the first place. Does anyone have advice on where to look?

    I am sure that with my new invention and some simple mass production techniques I will be able to sell these new people movers at a slight profit for less than $200,000 apiece.

    (Ok Dean Kamen if you are reading this - we are laughing with you, not at you. :)

    -:-

    Honestly though, if you want to build it just to build it because that is what you want to do, just buy a single one one of the ones off the shelf by Imation, reverse engineer it via destructive analysis (take it apart), use the parts and ideas from that one that you like, like someone else mentioned track down the OEM part maker for the drive and look into a bulk purchase of that part, then re-evaluate the viability of the project. But if it is in your heart, build it - that is for sure, and we stand behind you on building your prototype 100%.

    If you can't build it in mass quantity cheap enough to sell it at the price point of the Imation less 10% (because between now and then prices are coming down on hardware) then it isn't a viable commercial product. If you can build it for a third the cost of the Imation unit, go for it.

    But follow your dreams. Old men laying in their death beds never look back and say 'damn I am glad I played it safe back when I was young.'

  • I've been looking for these, too. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @10:46AM (#5440316) Homepage

    I've filled out the full size bays in quite a number of machines I have, and most still have floppy size bays available. I could put a floppy or zip drive in there, but a floppy is way too tight to build the rescue disk system I need to have (because it has more software than can ever fit on a floppy ... it's about 32MB in size). I've tried Zip drives, but all three I've used turn out to be regularly unreliable (I can coax them to work, but this isn't the kind of thing I want to put in customer locations). Maybe it's the media, but either way, the Zip drive option isn't where I want to go.

    A small mini-CD drive that fits in the floppy drive bay would be ideal. Such a product would also let us start downsizing computer cases in a lot of new ways for the special purposes that don't need large amounts of CD data (such as firewalls and specialized mini-servers).

    • CompactFlash is getting cheap. Like $20 for 32M, $25 for 64M, $35-40 for 128M, $60-70 for 256M

      Get a CompactFlash reader. They come standard in a lot of new multimedia machines, are available as external units via USB, and I think are available as drive bay units as well.

      You can also put a PCMCIA reader (standard on laptops) in a slot bay and use a CompactFlash to PCMCIA adapter (adapter is a PCMCIA card you slide the CompactFlash into, costs about $10 - $20.)

      Granted the media is a little more than mini-CDs but if you are not sending out updates all the time it isn't that expensive (plus with a CF-IDE adapter you can actually boot from it like a hard drive - not unlike a CD come to think of it)

      • Yep, but the mini-cds have one other distinct advantage over CompactFlash. Most, if not all computers today have some sort of CD Drive (or DVD, or CD Burner, or DVD Burner) that are compatible with mini-cds.

        The only type of drive I can imagine that is probably incompatible with it could be the drives on some apple machines (though, no currently shipping models, I think)... the old iMac comes to mind, with those car stereo style, tray-less cd-drives. In theory loading a mini-cd into one of those should be possible (correct me if I'm wrong with this assumption), but I'm not too sure about doing it consistently (I'd have to see it to believe it I guess, a bad picture comes to mind, for some reason, of the mini-cd playing pin-ball inside your computer if improperly positioned while loaded...).

        Other than that, most modern drives are compatible with the media. Consequently, most computers would support updates / boot disks / etc. from mini-cds regardless of the sized drive and can burn them from any modern CD Burner...

        I like the compactflash idea, though! Also, an even more expensive option is the (formerly IBM Storage) Microdrive [hgst.com]. Of course, these all, as you've pointed out, can't currently touch CD's in any size on price point... and hey, those mini-cd's can hold 185 MB!

      • Re:I've been looking for these, too. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @12:21PM (#5440947) Homepage
        There are two problems with drive-bay Compact Flash readers.

        1. They are a real pain to convince to boot. I've heard it done, and there are distros that boot from Compact Flash, but I'll be damned if I can do it.

        2. They are incredibly "fussy." Not only do the cards have to stay in at all times (without removing them), but sometimes you just can't boot with them in, or will get strange, somewhat random errors (under XP) which can be rectified by removing the card. Of course, removing the card will often crash the computer, but sometimes it won't (And no, unmounting under linux doesn't help). Quite often, if I'm having an unexplained propogation of errors on a running system, it is because I accidently left a CF in the drive.

        With Compact Flash you also have the problem of 1,000 Read / Write cycles per cell, or 3 read / write cycles per day for one year. Obviously caching data is essential, but you still have that low, low media life to contend with.

        I'd personally take a mini CDRW any day of the week. But neither of these solves the other problem, which would be a lack of IDE connections. If no IDE connectors are available, neither solution will do you any good. If there are available IDE connectors, why not open the side of the case and plug in a vanilla CD drive?
        • I believe all CF implementations are at least 10,000 to 100,000 write cycles minimum. (I'm 99% positive it's at the 100,000+ range at this point.)

          I don't know of any flash memories limited to 1,000 write cycles at this point except for the program flash of Atmel AVR processors, but the only time such a unit should ever exceed (or even come close to) 1,000 flashes is during the software development cycle. (I think the average life of an AVR in Cornell's EE 476 lab is 2-4 weeks, due to the fact that it gets flashed every 2-3 minutes or more for 4-5 hours/day. In a production system the program flash should never need to be altered and in fact CAN'T be altered without external programming hardware in most AVR models.)
        • You don't use the drive bay reader as a boot device, you find the IDE-CF adapter, about $20, Google for 'compactflash ide adapter boot drive' - http://www.flashmemory.com.au/CFIDE.html is as good a place to start as any ... I think there exists converters to use CF cards as IDE drives in laptops also...

          Write cycles are currently 100,000 to a million cycles per cell. Not forever but better than the 1 write cycle on CD-R's and mini-CD (do the minis come RW?) Once you get your system stable I envision the thrashing to be minimal if you set it up with that in mind (like a RAM drive for temporary files, etc...)

          Then again once the drive is in the machine, mini CDRW media is really, really cheap compared to CF so ... YMMV.
        • Your CF reader may be plugged into an IDE port, or into a USB port (or, possibly, a FireWire port, but that's like USB for this purpose). If it's plugged into an IDE port, you should have no trouble booting from it, provided your OS can boot from another IDE drive (Linux can, NT could, and XP probably can as well). If it's plugged into a USB port, you should have no trouble hotplugging the CF card, not even under Windows XP, and certainly not under Linux. In no case should you have trouble just "leaving it in"--it's either an extra IDE drive or an extra USB drive--why would any OS care?

          It sounds to me you just have bad hardware, whatever hardware you have.

      • One of the reasons CF won't be practical is that each machine will be in a separate customer location, and upgrades will be distributed by sending a replacement media to each location. At a few pennies per CDR this is practical. Mini-CD media is nearly as cheap these days. CF is nowhere as close. With CF now I have to arrange to have the old media shipped back. I'm better off with full size CD drives than with CF.

    • Yeah I've been looking for these too, not for any practical reason at all, just because I think it would be cool to have a mini cd drive :P

    • Re:I've been looking for these, too. (Score:4, Informative)

      by ag144 ( 35392 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @11:55AM (#5440775) Homepage
      You should try this Google search, particularly the Phillips link:

      +small +"form factor" +"optical drive" [google.com]

      --
      Allen Gray

  • The RipGO may have an internal ide interface that gets converted for use with USB. if so just customize the hell out of it, removing any unwanted buttons that would allow features like playing mp3s and maybe a specialized enclosure of some kind.

  • They are only available in mass quantity bare (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @12:09PM (#5440871) Homepage Journal
    If you plan on making a few thousand units you'll be able to work with the asian companies that make the mechanical portions of these drives that you can put in your product.

    Other than that, no one is interested in making a mass produced version simply because it holds so little data. Perhaps if someone would finally come out with an 80mm DVD then the players for that (~1GB for dual layer) might be enough data to make it worthwhile.

    At this point, I'd suggest you simply use a large 2.5" or 1.8" or compactflash hard drive.

    No one wants to carry their music seperate from their players anymore anyway. It's cheaper to have them seperate now, and the user interface is a little easier since you don't have to spend so much time catagorizing your music and playlists, but this isn't the case for the IPOD, and future devices aren't likely to continue to do it this way.

    -Adam
    • No one wants to carry their music seperate from their players anymore anyway. It's cheaper to have them seperate now, and the user interface is a little easier since you don't have to spend so much time catagorizing your music and playlists, but this isn't the case for the IPOD, and future devices aren't likely to continue to do it this way.

      There are two good reasons to have music separate from the player.

      First, you can conveniently trade music away from your computer. I have an iPod. (I love it.) I can't trade music from my iPod to a friend's iPod without going through a laptop or desktop computer. You can argue this is a software issue Apple could fix with a firmware change, but the little lcd screen really isn't a good way to do selection for "send this but not this". That's probably part of why you can't delete songs on the iPod unless you hook it up to a computer. (Though I'd really like to be able to do that too.)

      Second, you don't use any battery power by handing your friend a cd or mini-cd. This is a wonderful thing for a device with no swappable battery. These things live and die by battery usage.
  • I don't know what your project looks like, but perhaps you could take a slimline CD drive from a laptop and pull the parts out of it to build what you need. Of course you'd lose the tray load ability, but maybe that's ok. If you are concerned about interconnect, almost all of the newer drives use a standard connector, and it is actually not hard to find an adapter to standard PC power and IDE.

  • Forget mini-cd's!!! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Get hold of sony's parts dept and obtain a vaio mini-disc data drive :)

    That way, you can store data, import mini-discs and anything else you want. Mini-discs are small enough for what you are seeking.
    • Actually this is a great idea. I mean, the VAIO thing [vnunet.com] seems unlikely. There is also a media center PC with minidisc, but it retails at 2999, so I won't even bother providing a link.

      However, I have a friend that just bought a Sony MiniDisc/MP3 player from Best Buy [bestbuy.com]. Incidentally, it was $129, less than half the price listed here. I am not entirely sure it was the same model, but I think it is. I have no reason for the price discrepancy.

      In any case, if you were not set on the medium (optical vs. minidisc), this might suit your purposes. You could disassemble this and make it smaller, though it is pretty damn small as it is. You were unclear in your post whether your desire is just to prove that you can hack an MP3 player together, or whether you were trying to save money, but $129 is pretty darn cheap. If it is missing the features you want, you could buy this and hack those in. A bigger LCD would be nice. Also, there is this, a computer MiniDisc drive [sony.com]. It might help you with construction/experimentation, or even using this device in your ultimate invention.

      The cons as I see them are that you are tied down to a proprietary, closed-source medium. It is relatively popular, but not ubiquitous (like CDR).

      The pros: it's cheap. It's easy. It's small.

      Good Luck. -Foster
  • Remember when everyone and their dog was building their own MP3 portable? I was still in college.

    It's time to move on and find something else to build from scratch. Nobody's gonna be impressed by a bunch of machinery and duct tape that doesn't quite fit in your pocket and only holds about 8 hours worth of music. And it's gonna end up costing you a lot of money and (more importantly) time.

    - A.P.
  • FYI:

    The Imation RipGo is available here for $100:

    http://www.ssdonline.com/detail_page.cfm?Product ID=41608&affid=h57

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