CF to IDE adapter...

joevennix · Post by **joevennix** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 9:58 pm

So I was holding this cheap CF based mp3 player whose battery had broken, and I began to think... if I could hook this up to a DC adapter at the right voltage, it could still work. Also, I was wondering, if I were to wire a CF-IDE adapter on to the CF port, and then connect an old 5gb notebook drive to it, would it work? I would probably have to supply the drive with more power, but this can be easily fixed.
Thanks!

loup · Post by **loup** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 10:09 pm

assuming the device's firmware supported the size of the drive it should be fine

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 10:28 pm

if not, it might still work, but only see the maximum size it can see. cf cards go up to like 8 gigs though.

yeah the hard drive is probably going to need +5 and +12 volts, so youre going to have to think of a way to get all that, plus 3v or 1.5v for the player. good luck.

stuartjmoore · Post by **stuartjmoore** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 11:06 pm

1.8" drives only use 3.3volts, get one of them

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 12:00 am

Ok so you want an adapter for the Compactflash card? Ebay has tons. You want to connect a laptop hard drive to you computer through a compactflash addapter? Not likely. On thing is that the port can be either 3.3v or 5v, and really if your going to do someting like connect a compactflash to an IDE chain you might as wll buy a laptop hard drive adapter too.

Both items will set you back about $5 each if you look on Ebay. And this will be better then trying to go about it the way you sound you wanted.

loup · Post by **loup** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 12:31 am

Sparkfist wrote:Ok so you want an adapter for the Compactflash card? Ebay has tons. You want to connect a laptop hard drive to you computer through a compactflash addapter? Not likely. On thing is that the port can be either 3.3v or 5v, and really if your going to do someting like connect a compactflash to an IDE chain you might as wll buy a laptop hard drive adapter too.

Both items will set you back about $5 each if you look on Ebay. And this will be better then trying to go about it the way you sound you wanted.

Based on your reply I can only guess that you mearly skimmed over what was written in the thread. He doesn't want to connect a laptop hdd to a computer through a CF adapter, he wants to connect a laptop hdd to an mp3 player that has a CF slot. CF and IDE use the same pinout, all he has to do is make sure the correct amount of power is going to the HDD (well, that and have a CF to 2.5" ide adapter, unless he really wants to wire it up by hand,) but he was planning on hooking it up to something like a wallwart rather than use a battery, which he should be able to do fairly easily.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 11:48 am

Uh huh.

Bare in mind that the Compactflash doesn't have the same pinout as IDE. Compactflash has 50 pins IDE has 40. Further the compactflash can run on 3.3v which if he is planning to use a laptop hard drive for the storage medium it likely will not work, those drives need 5v.

If you want to try making an adapter, good luck. I have a compactflash to laptop EIDE adapter. You'll be soldering a lot of connections and very close to one another. But you can still be hampered by the fact that the MP3 player still needs to output 5v for the hard drive to work.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 3:25 pm

While most CF cards can work in IDE mode, not all devices that take CF will work with IDE drives. The only adapter I know of for going in that direction is for embedded motherboards that have there second IDE channel as a CF slot, and costs $40.

In other words, it'd be a lot easier to buy an laptop dirve enclosure that can play MP3s (check ebay).