Idiots Guide To Gp2x External Hard Drive

[Niku]

My brother is going to Afghanistan in a few weeks (he's in the army) and is a looking for a decent all in one game/move/music player, as I have a psp i've been looking into setting that up for him but the only problem is that the capacity of the duo memory sticks is pretty small when compared to their price (especially if youre looking to carry 20gb plus worth of data)(and also there is the firmware issue, its running 1.5 which means none of the newer games work, which is pretty lame, but newer firmware means no emulators) so I turned to the alternatives, the best of which seems to be the GP2X, which looks pretty awesome.

I've been reading up on the idea of connecting an external battery powered hard drive (like this one for example http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...GSYAWA?v=glance ) but I cant seem to find a definitive source of information on how to go about doing this and if it even works. I've found sites offering USB connectors (http://www.artaylor.co.uk/~richard/gp2x/) and the BOB (http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-d1-49-en-70-1f8w.html) which i've read about but I am still totally in the dark.

So... can anyone help please? some sort of basic tutorial from someone who's achieved this would be ideal.

 

[palmtastic]

I also want to know if a portable harddisk has been successfully connected to a gp2x.

Physically the connection is not a problem. One only needs a usb cable. But behind-the-scene things, such as usb driver, and usb dc power, are the main obstacles I can think of.

Can anyone shed some light on the subject? Thanks!

 

[Feeg]

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=29323&hl=
http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/USB_Host

 

[krosfyah]

I also want to know if a portable harddisk has been successfully connected to a gp2x.

Physically the connection is not a problem. One only needs a usb cable. But behind-the-scene things, such as usb driver, and usb dc power, are the main obstacles I can think of.

Can anyone shed some light on the subject? Thanks!

Actually, the connection is the only difficult part. A simple usb cable won't be enough as it has to connect to the EXT connector on the bottom of the GP2x (not the usb connector). Other than that, it's just case of turning on some options in the system settings and it's pretty much plug n play.

 

[torpor]

Get the EXT2->USB Cable worked out (DIY or buy from Art), or get the BreakoutBox, and you will find its Dead Simple to use an external USB-based hard drive on the GP2X.

As reported in the link above, I regularly use my JOBO Datatank, battery-powered hard disk, with my GP2X, and it just works so well I've forgotten how much hassle it is if you don't have the cable (I made my own) ..

 

[palmtastic]

Get the EXT2->USB Cable worked out (DIY or buy from Art).....
I've forgotten how much hassle it is if you don't have the cable (I made my own) ..

Do you have the pin-out diagram to make the EXT2->USB Cable? Where to buy the EXT2 plug if I plan to make my own cable?

 

[torpor]

Do you have the pin-out diagram to make the EXT2->USB Cable?

No, but the Wiki does.

Where to buy the EXT2 plug if I plan to make my own cable?

Samsung E810 datacable, or get the video-out cable from GPH themselves and add the USB side (easy enough), but .. again .. see the wiki, for this territory has been fully explored, conquered, parcelled, drawn, and left for the settlers to build little white picket fences on ..

 

[aapje89]

read this to see how the Break out Board works:
http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,23,1626

 

[palmtastic]

Could any guru here confirm my newbie guesswork regarding the EXT2 --> USB pinout connections below?

EXT Pins -----> USB Pins
9. (USBH1-)
10. (USBH1+)
11. (USBD-) ----> 2 (USBD-)
12. (USBD+) ----> 3 (USBD+)
20. (+3.3V) ----> 1 (VCC)
13. (GND) ----> 4 (GND)


What are the USBH1- and USBH1+ pins for?

My apologies for the above newbie or near-idiot question!

 

[winapa]

My brother is going to Afghanistan in a few weeks (he's in the army) and is a looking for a decent all in one game/move/music player, as I have a psp i've been looking into setting that up for him but the only problem is that the capacity of the duo memory sticks is pretty small when compared to their price (especially if youre looking to carry 20gb plus worth of data)(and also there is the firmware issue, its running 1.5 which means none of the newer games work, which is pretty lame, but newer firmware means no emulators) so I turned to the alternatives, the best of which seems to be the GP2X, which looks pretty awesome.

I've been reading up on the idea of connecting an external battery powered hard drive (like this one for example http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...GSYAWA?v=glance ) but I cant seem to find a definitive source of information on how to go about doing this and if it even works. I've found sites offering USB connectors (http://www.artaylor.co.uk/~richard/gp2x/) and the BOB (http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-d1-49-en-70-1f8w.html) which i've read about but I am still totally in the dark.

So... can anyone help please? some sort of basic tutorial from someone who's achieved this would be ideal.

Why not just go for a couple of largeish sd cards? They're cheap, take less out of the GP2x and are far more portable. You wouldn't believe how much stuff you can fit on a 1gb card. There are utilities out there to squash films down to a reasonable size too.

 

[BradN]

Could any guru here confirm my newbie guesswork regarding the EXT2 --> USB pinout connections below?

EXT Pins -----> USB Pins
9. (USBH1-)
10. (USBH1+)
11. (USBD-) ----> 2 (USBD-)
12. (USBD+) ----> 3 (USBD+)
20. (+3.3V) ----> 1 (VCC)
13. (GND) ----> 4 (GND)


What are the USBH1- and USBH1+ pins for?

My apologies for the above newbie or near-idiot question!

I think the USBH pins are used here ("host"), and the D pins are actually routed to the USB2 controller. If you have a MKI unit, it's not even worth connecting the +3.3V line (USB uses 5V and probably not much will run on 3.3) unless you have a voltage step-up converter, but MKII outputs 5V (this may be on different pins, you'd have to check) which would be useful. If you only intend to run self powered devices, it's not important at all.

The only other important consideration is adding the filtering components, which I think is detailed on the wiki. Without them, you might get low speed devices like mice/keyboards to work, but hard drives or other 11mbit things will likely fail.

 

[yalborap]

My brother is going to Afghanistan in a few weeks (he's in the army) and is a looking for a decent all in one game/move/music player, as I have a psp i've been looking into setting that up for him but the only problem is that the capacity of the duo memory sticks is pretty small when compared to their price (especially if youre looking to carry 20gb plus worth of data)(and also there is the firmware issue, its running 1.5 which means none of the newer games work, which is pretty lame, but newer firmware means no emulators) so I turned to the alternatives, the best of which seems to be the GP2X, which looks pretty awesome.

I've been reading up on the idea of connecting an external battery powered hard drive (like this one for example http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...GSYAWA?v=glance ) but I cant seem to find a definitive source of information on how to go about doing this and if it even works. I've found sites offering USB connectors (http://www.artaylor.co.uk/~richard/gp2x/) and the BOB (http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-d1-49-en-70-1f8w.html) which i've read about but I am still totally in the dark.

So... can anyone help please? some sort of basic tutorial from someone who's achieved this would be ideal.

Why not just go for a couple of largeish sd cards? They're cheap, take less out of the GP2x and are far more portable. You wouldn't believe how much stuff you can fit on a 1gb card. There are utilities out there to squash films down to a reasonable size too.

This is true. However, for sheer amount of stuff, an external hard drive CAN be nice.

All you need is a USB cable for the device. If you're willing to buy from the UK, this site sells them for a reasonable price.

 

[winapa]

My brother is going to Afghanistan in a few weeks (he's in the army) and is a looking for a decent all in one game/move/music player, as I have a psp i've been looking into setting that up for him but the only problem is that the capacity of the duo memory sticks is pretty small when compared to their price (especially if youre looking to carry 20gb plus worth of data)(and also there is the firmware issue, its running 1.5 which means none of the newer games work, which is pretty lame, but newer firmware means no emulators) so I turned to the alternatives, the best of which seems to be the GP2X, which looks pretty awesome.

I've been reading up on the idea of connecting an external battery powered hard drive (like this one for example http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...GSYAWA?v=glance ) but I cant seem to find a definitive source of information on how to go about doing this and if it even works. I've found sites offering USB connectors (http://www.artaylor.co.uk/~richard/gp2x/) and the BOB (http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-d1-49-en-70-1f8w.html) which i've read about but I am still totally in the dark.

So... can anyone help please? some sort of basic tutorial from someone who's achieved this would be ideal.

Why not just go for a couple of largeish sd cards? They're cheap, take less out of the GP2x and are far more portable. You wouldn't believe how much stuff you can fit on a 1gb card. There are utilities out there to squash films down to a reasonable size too.

This is true. However, for sheer amount of stuff, an external hard drive CAN be nice.

All you need is a USB cable for the device. If you're willing to buy from the UK, this site sells them for a reasonable price.

This guy is going to AFGANISTAN...Its not like he can pop down the local shop if it goes wrong (well he could, but he might get shot), if you ask me the simpler the better in this case.

 

[Niku]

My brother is going to Afghanistan in a few weeks (he's in the army) and is a looking for a decent all in one game/move/music player, as I have a psp i've been looking into setting that up for him but the only problem is that the capacity of the duo memory sticks is pretty small when compared to their price (especially if youre looking to carry 20gb plus worth of data)(and also there is the firmware issue, its running 1.5 which means none of the newer games work, which is pretty lame, but newer firmware means no emulators) so I turned to the alternatives, the best of which seems to be the GP2X, which looks pretty awesome.

I've been reading up on the idea of connecting an external battery powered hard drive (like this one for example http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...GSYAWA?v=glance ) but I cant seem to find a definitive source of information on how to go about doing this and if it even works. I've found sites offering USB connectors (http://www.artaylor.co.uk/~richard/gp2x/) and the BOB (http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-d1-49-en-70-1f8w.html) which i've read about but I am still totally in the dark.

So... can anyone help please? some sort of basic tutorial from someone who's achieved this would be ideal.

Why not just go for a couple of largeish sd cards? They're cheap, take less out of the GP2x and are far more portable. You wouldn't believe how much stuff you can fit on a 1gb card. There are utilities out there to squash films down to a reasonable size too.

This is true. However, for sheer amount of stuff, an external hard drive CAN be nice.

All you need is a USB cable for the device. If you're willing to buy from the UK, this site sells them for a reasonable price.

Thanks everyone, this is a great help, i needed some sort of confirmation before i spent a load of money
one more quick question, when the hdd is connected can you write to and from the sd cards in the GP2X?

also does it make any difference what kind of external hdd you use? can anyone recommend a decent external usb hdd casing, which ones have the best battery life?

 

[krosfyah]

I copy/move files between the HDD and SD card all the time using the file browser. No problems there.

I have a Digimate II Plus and it works pretty well.

 

[Niku]

One more question for anyone that uses an external hdd, do you use the standard firmware/os for the gamepark to move files to/from the hdd or are you running linux?

Wait, make that two questions.. can you make one fat32 partition of say 80gb or is there an upper limit, i heard it was around 32 gb for fat32?

 

[BradN]

fat32 is only limited to 32GB if you use windows XP (maybe 2000) to format it. If you use linux's mkdosfs or an older windows, or possibly even the windows command line format command, it'll work it fine. Note that fat32 tends to perform worse as the partition size increases, just due to how it works internally, but this is probably not a huge problem when you're limited by the USB connection anyway.

I believe there's no GP2X software changes needed to enable full access to a fat32 formatted external drive (starting with firmware 2.0), but if you want to use a different (and possibly more efficient) filesystem like ext2, you may have to write a couple scripts to handle mounting/unmounting the drive. But then you will also have compatability issues if you want to connect the drive to a windows machine, etc...

There are ext2 filesystem drivers for windows, but you might not have the ability/permission to install them on a machine that's not yours. More exotic configurations, like having a fat32 partition to exchange data, and ext2 for the GP2X to use are always possible, but it will slightly complicate how you deal with mounting the partitions on the gp2x side.

In short, there are plenty of choices, fat32 works 'out of the box', and you should be able to find a decent solution.

Side rant: Does anyone else find it ridiculous that Microsoft cripples their disk admin program to disallow fat32 over 32GB? There are still (and will be for a long time) legitimate uses for this, and a simple performance warning would have sufficed. This is partially why I use linux personally - I grew sick of microsoft doing things in their own interests over that of the customers'.

 

[Niku]

fat32 is only limited to 32GB if you use windows XP (maybe 2000) to format it. If you use linux's mkdosfs or an older windows, or possibly even the windows command line format command, it'll work it fine. Note that fat32 tends to perform worse as the partition size increases, just due to how it works internally, but this is probably not a huge problem when you're limited by the USB connection anyway.

I believe there's no GP2X software changes needed to enable full access to a fat32 formatted external drive (starting with firmware 2.0), but if you want to use a different (and possibly more efficient) filesystem like ext2, you may have to write a couple scripts to handle mounting/unmounting the drive. But then you will also have compatability issues if you want to connect the drive to a windows machine, etc...

There are ext2 filesystem drivers for windows, but you might not have the ability/permission to install them on a machine that's not yours. More exotic configurations, like having a fat32 partition to exchange data, and ext2 for the GP2X to use are always possible, but it will slightly complicate how you deal with mounting the partitions on the gp2x side.

In short, there are plenty of choices, fat32 works 'out of the box', and you should be able to find a decent solution.

Side rant: Does anyone else find it ridiculous that Microsoft cripples their disk admin program to disallow fat32 over 32GB? There are still (and will be for a long time) legitimate uses for this, and a simple performance warning would have sufficed. This is partially why I use linux personally - I grew sick of microsoft doing things in their own interests over that of the customers'.

No matter how you look at it microsoft are self serving evil bastards what're you gonna do?

Can you run Ext3 on gp2x?, I have no experience with linux or the ext file system so I'm not sure what the difference would be. Also how do you get windows to recognise an ext2 drive?

 

[BradN]

Ext3 should work also, but the journalling will add some performance overhead. The only difference between 2 and 3 is a journal used to make sure that filesystem structure changes either entirely occur or don't occur at all (to prevent filesystem corruption). By default, it doesn't protect file contents, but damage there is not as severe as hosing a whole directory or similar.

Here are some ext2 drivers for windows NT/2000/XP:
http://www.fs-driver.org/ read/write, last updated end of 2005
http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ read/write, last updated mid 2005

Note that these don't support the ext3 journal, but will access ext3 partitions just fine, as long as the filesystem is always cleanly unmounted (it won't check the journal for updates to the filesystem that didn't get written).

For the gp2x itself, I'm not sure if it supports ext3 without an extra kernel module or not. It will likely be more of a pain to get the drive formatted as ext2/3 than using it though. Booting knoppix, etc, on a computer might be the easiest if you don't want to look for a gp2x utility to do it.

 

[TheMinder]

Apologies for bumping this post after it went into hibernation, but yesterday i came across this page that might be of use regarding formatting large drives under windows :

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm