DMS SSD Solution

[alkmisc]

The hard drive in my DMS was starting to show signs of failure and due for a replacement so I started looking at options that don't involve a mechanical drive (when it gets really cold in the northeast they don't like to move, plus bouncing on dirt roads probably is not good for durability).  That pretty much leaves SSD drives which traditionally have not played well with the Phatbox plus IDE SSDs seem scarce nowadays.  My last drive was 320 GB and getting full so capacity was a consideration.

I ended up trying a Samsung 860 EVO mSATA 500GB drive in an "AbleConn IIDE-MSAT mSATA SSD to 2.5-Inch IDE Adapter Converter" which adapts the mSATA drive to IDE.  Guess what?  It works!  Phatbox can make use of the whole capacity of the drive.  I'm guessing this may also work with other mSATA drives but don't have the need to try right now.  It'll be good the hear if anyone else does try with other drives.  The only visible weak point in the system is that the drive is secured by a wire latch so we'll see how the holds up over time.

Only thing left to do is remember how I got PHMM to generate track titles from FLAC files like I did before...

[VorTechS]

That's good to know, I haven't ventured into SSD territory, but might do so now!

Only thing left to do is remember how I got PHMM to generate track titles from FLAC files like I did before...

Phathack MM reads tag information embedded in the files itself.  If there's no tag information in the file, there was no way written to try and read them from elsewhere - although it's a possibility.

[Au2ro2]

Great Idea, I will have to try this, I was even considering converting my FLAC collection to MP3 to be able to fit some new stuff onto my 80GB drive. Or getting a larger PATA drive.
This solution will save me from having to do that.
BTW I use MusicBrainz Picard https://picard.musicbrainz.org/downloads/ to tag all my files inc. FLAC files and PHMM does recognise the tags OK. (Only a few are problematic and I can change the metadata in PHMM for those.)
I am just going through re-tagging as I was annoyed that some artists/albums/tracks were tagged with slightly different names for different files.

[VorTechS]

It sounds like that's pretty much going to be like the GraceNote solution where it scans the first X bytes of the file, converts to a hash and then matches it up against whatever is stored in their DB.

Definitely doable.  I'll bear that in mind, when I get some free time to dive into the code again.

[Au2ro2]

OK, so I got an mSATA 240GB drive and 2.5" IDE convertor/caddy and put it into my DMS, but I can't get the drive formatted.
I have tried PhatHack DMS tools in my Win 10 Virtualbox and 'Create New DMS' never seems to complete successfully.
I even left it running overnight and in the morning it stated that it had successfully created a new DMS but there was a windows error onscreen as well and the drive was not recognised by PHMM.
I can't even format successfully it from within Linux when it is in the DMS cradle.
I did suspect a poor power connection in the cradle which I have now sorted but I still can't format it.
The cradle does still recognise my old drive when I put it in the DMS so I know that it is working
I have now ordered a USB to IDE adaptor device to see if that helps.

Is there a trick to formatting an mSATA for use with the Phatbox?

[alkmisc]

For formatting I just let the Phathack DMS 2.15 tools run and it didn't require any intervention.  I was running it with the administrator account and the elevated permissions option and I think I used the quick format.  It worked on Windows 7.  I could not get the software to run correctly on 10 or XP but that seemed more a software than hardware concern.  I don't know if a virtual machine would cause any issues since that inserts even more intermediate layers in hardware recognition and translation.

[Au2ro2]

Thanks alkmisc
I will try the hidden administrator account in Win 10.
If that fails I will have to see if I can spin up a Win7 virtualbox or even build a win 7 PC just for use with PhatHack.

[Au2ro2]

I used the following instructions to enable the hidden administrator account in win 10:-
Opened a command prompt with administrative rights.
Ran the following command in the command prompt window
Net user administrator /active:yes

So, I can now format an original 20GB DMS that I had spare with PhatHack DMS Tools when logged in as the administrator and that works in the phatbox  (I still have another original that I used for the hack). So I know the PhatHack DMS Tools work in Windows 10 when logged in as the administrator.
I am still having trouble with the mSATA drive though.
I can format the mSATA drive OK in Linux when connected directly to a PATA port and can copy files to the partitions OK after that in both linux and Windows 10 (there is no PATA port on the PC with the virtual WIN 10 on it though), it just seems to be that the PhatHack DMS Tools running on virtual win 10 have issues with formatting the mSATA drive when connected to the DMS cradle.

Now, if only there was a tool to copy and sign the required files on to the DMS after formatting manually, that would work, wouldn't it?

[Au2ro2]

To answer my own question,
"Now, if only there was a tool to copy and sign the required files on to the DMS after formatting manually, that would work, wouldn't it?"
I think

From:-
https://forum.phathack.com/index.php/topic,1497.msg9786.html#msg9786

"Also the new version will include the facility to explicitly format and load the firmware as opposed to re-partitioning the disk.

In the short term you could simply format PHTSYS and PHTDTA and then run the firmware update process using the DMS hack tools."

So, If I were to partition and format the drive outwith PhatHack DMS I could then just use the 'Update Firmware' option in PhatHack DMS Tools and that would copy the required files to the PHTSYS partition?

Then I could go on to transfer my audio files using PHMM?

Worth a try...

[Au2ro2]

I am now using a mechanical 250GB drive as I still cannot get the mSATA and IDE convertor to work. I might try cloning the mechanical drive to the mSATA to see if that works.

[VorTechS]

You can't simply create partitions and copy files to them.  The partitions must explicitly start at a given offset, 1024 I think.  The phatbox checks this.