MP3 player repair day

[johnridley]

My cheapo MP3 player (512M Sandisk, $18 woot.com special) got wet yesterday while riding in the rain. In the past that hasn't bothered it, but it quit on the way home. Dead battery, I assumed. Charged the battery last night, but this morning it went 10 minutes before croaking.
Fresh battery at work, it wouldn't power up.

Cracked it open, discovered that some nasty crud had crystallized around some IC leads. It sounds kind of gross, but I suspect it's salt from sweat, since it's been around my neck for several thousand miles. Some water followed by WD40 chased it away and now it's OK again.


While I was thinking I'd lost the player, I started reviewing my options for replacing it. I have a Zen Vision:M which is great but too big to use on the bike (plus it's hard drive based so probably not good).

I do have a Zen Micro that L dropped and destroyed a few months back. She got a new Samsung player which is probably the nicest small player I've ever seen (the iPod nano only wishes it was this cute or had a screen this nice) so the Micro has just been sitting on my dresser for a while. I knew the Micro had a microdrive in it, so I cracked it open tonight, put the microdrive in the computer's CF slot, and sure enough it's recognized but is pretty much one big bad sector.

I stole a 1GB CF card from my SLR and put it in there. Formatted it up, charged the battery, threw a bunch of songs on it, and it's doing fine. It can't have the CF card permanently, so I need to decide whether to buy a 4G or an 8G card for it. The pricing is relatively linear, so the decision is a little harder (if it was $40 for 4G and $55 for 8G, I'd go with 8G, but it's $80 for 8G). As a bonus, I'll be losing all the moving parts of the microdrive so it'll be a decent bike ridin' player.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

It was a 5GB player, bigger than the T9. I only put a 1G card in it last night because that's what I had around.

I've never liked microdrives, I always thought they were a crude solution. I was happy to sell the one I bought for my camera years ago. They're pretty much dead, I don't think anyone is still using them though you can buy them for practically nothing online. The iPod mini and the Zen Micro were a few of the last things to use them. Flash is cheap enough now that the risk of the spinning media isn't worth it anymore.

They were pretty binary from what I have read. You might drop one 49 times, and if they still work 100%, there's no damage; they have G-force protection that locks the heads and allows them to take drops of pretty high Gs as long as it's not actively reading/writing at the time. But that 50th drop when it's actually running is going to kill it dead. That's what happened with this one. No blaming L, one of my drops could have just as easily killed it.

Dropping in a flash card will get rid of the drop risk for the most part anyway.

Agree that the T9 is a much nicer player though; hardly even in the same league.