If it doesn’t exist why not build it? One of our readers did just that. Searching for a replacement hard drive for his old school iRiver H300, abi reader Andrew, decided to go with an SSD drive to avoid future hard drive failures. He was unable to find the proper SSD drive to replace the H300s so he looked for a broken hard drive player to marry with an SSD drive.

Not wanting to pay $300 for a new flash player, he wanted to go cheap and hack something cool together. He was able to dig up a broken Zune 120 and a refurbished SanDisk EIDE/PATA SSD drive for a total cost of $130 bucks off of eBay.

Want one? Andrew has made a nice detailed guide- you should be able to follow and make your own.

Since my first gen Rockboxed Sansa Clip died, I ordered an IDE to CF adapter for my X5L after I read the Rockbox CF Mod Wiki page.

Installation was pretty straightforward, I only had to cut/saw the plastic bit off one side of the adapter's IDE connector to fit. I also had to shorten the master/slave jumper so it doesn't poke the PCB and battery, use a slimmer jumper bridge, and electrical tape on the backside (see red dots in the photos).

Speed with a 300x Lexar CF is blazing, bootup is almost instantly. Too bad there's no affordable 300x 32GB card available, so I have to see which 16 or 32Gb card is fast enough to be useful in the X5. I'm leaning towards a Kingston Elite Pro 133x (should be faster than 133x in reality), or a Hama HighSpeed Pro (should have similar speeds as the twice as expensive SanDisk Extreme III). On another note, the X5 is now also quite a bit lighter than with the 1.8" HDD inside.

Click over to the mod thread for more pics.

An updated version of the D2 was just released a few weeks ago and dubbed the D2+. Many of us where a bit puzzled as to the minimal changes made through out the firmware. Changes were made in the firmware adding BBE+ enhancement and new GUI with the psychical design being the biggest noticeable change. Though now we know that most of the internal components have remained unchanged thanks to a few industrious and enthusiastic D2 owners.

It turns out that the D2+ firmware can be brute forced onto the D2 with a tool developed by the Rockbox crew, TCCTool- originally used to load firmware on bricked Telechip based devices. The steps to do this can be found in the D2 forums- Martin has even updated his popular More Mono theme to the D2+ firmware.

Updating the design, giving it a firmware refresh, and calling it a D2+ is a great idea, but leaving old D2 users behind in the firmware refresh is another story. The Zune has already set the precedent for this when they still continue to update 2+ year old hardware with the same firmware as on the newest Zunes. So D2 fans become quite envious of the Zune and a bit abandoned Cowon. With that said, it would be honorable of them to go ahead and give the long time D2 owners the D2+ firmware upgrade without having to hack it. Hacks might cause an increase in support too.

Below are a few photos of the D2 running the D2+ firmware as well as RMAA proof showing that changing the firmware has also changed the sound signature from BBE to BBE+.

Update: Cowon contacted us to warn that there is risk in bricking (damaging/rendering it useless) your D2 by doing this. So in my words, do this at your own risk.