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I again translated a Chinese 
mod using babelfish and some common sence .
I've added a thing or two in the description of the pics to make things more clear.
Comments, changes and additions are welcome. All credits go to the original poster.
Original post and pics by user k95507475 on the mobile01.com forum.
A few days ago I saw pictures of a foreigner (mikelpn) who implemented a 1.8" portable HD into the eee. I've searched for a cheap 1.8" HD myself and bought the TOSHIBA MK2006GAL 20GB iPod HD ($35 on ebay) + an IDE to USB adapter.
The size looks about right to be able to fit in the eee but I didn't know anything about the performance of this drive, probably only 10MB/s?
Well if foreigners can, so can we for the love of Taiwan! 
This is the 1.8" HD
To make it fit, the case has to be modded
Let's start by opening up the eee...
Finding the right location
Dremeled off some of the plastic bits around the memory access panel
View from the other side
Test fitting the drive
Removed the casing from the IDE to USB adapter and hooked it up to the HD
Wired up a 4 wire connector to a free USB port on the motherboard
Removed the metal studs from the mobo to get more space for an easier fit of the drive
Testing the setup on an external USB port using HD Tune, yep that's not an eee
Top and bottom view of the setup wrapped in electrical 
tape to prevent shorting out anything on the mobo or on the setup itself
The setup located on and connected to the mobo
XP inside
Eee put back together with setup in place, ready for testing
The drive is recognized as a USB device by both the BIOS and XP
I was moved to tears when I saw that BIOS screen 
HD Tune test, ready for a laugh?
That concludes my writeup....your comments inspire me to continue!
Please don't argue, just talk about modding the eee. Eee PC is Easy to mod! 
Last edited by Crihz (2007-12-09 10:44:59 am)
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The reason the eee has a flash drive is for battery power. Surely this would at least half the battery life.
Shmoe
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True, but mods like this don't need to be practical, they just need to be cool - and this one is!
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I think this mod could be the first (i had this idea myself the other day) of a very much done mod. I was looking into putting larger SSDs into an EEE - the price at the moment is prohibitive but sooner or later we'll be able to buy decently cheap largish 1.8" SSDs (128/256gb is being developed) to put into our EEEs. You've merely jumped the gun & put a mag drive in.. nice mod
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Top and bottom view of the setup wrapped in duct tape to prevent shorting out anything on the mobo or on the setup itself
that's not duct tape
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EeePCer wrote:
that's not duct tape
Well, some sort of tape...not sure what they call it in Taiwan LOL (and nooo, that's not shrink wrap).
Just to make sure: "Duct tape, in the USA and Canada, is a vinyl, fabric-reinforced, multi-purpose adhesive tape with a soft and tacky pressure sensitive adhesive. It is generally silver or BLACK in color but many other colors and transparent tapes have recently become available."
Last edited by Crihz (2007-12-09 10:06:59 am)
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Funny thing about these pictures and others of internal eee mods is that there's no sense of scale. My mind knows what a hard drive looks like - a 3.5" hdd that is. And this looks just like that, so it all seems huge. Even though I'm reading this on my eee at the moment, there's just no sense of how tiny all the stuff in the picture is.
Last edited by tuxpocket (2007-12-09 10:14:07 am)
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Crihz wrote:
EeePCer wrote:
that's not duct tape
Well, some sort of tape...not sure what they call it in Taiwan LOL
probably the same thing they call it everywhere... electrical tape... lol 
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Crihz wrote:
"Duct tape, in the USA and Canada, is a vinyl, fabric-reinforced, multi-purpose adhesive tape with a soft and tacky pressure sensitive adhesive. It is generally silver or BLACK in color but many other colors and transparent tapes have recently become available."
Duct tape is like The Force. It has a light side and a dark side and it hold the universe together...
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Well, electrical tape over here is like half the size of that tape 
.
Could it be the scale issue perhaps 
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Crihz, thanks for the translation! Just wanted to ask about the ide to usb adapter, does a 1.8" HD require a specific adaptor?
or do they work with the 2.5" ones.. I'm thinking of doing this mod (that toshiba site has hdd models up to 100GB!)
Last edited by drenboy (2007-12-09 10:54:23 am)
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Hi drenboy, I'm not sure about what size the connector is. It looks like a 2.5" connector. Maybe you could check the specs on the Toshiba website by clicking on the link in the first few lines of my first post in this thread.
--------EDIT--------
This should work:
http://cgi.benl.ebay.be/USB-2-0-1-8-Tos … dZViewItem
Or this:
http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-2-0-Hard-Drive- … dZViewItem
Or maybe this one:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/1-8-HD-HDD-Enclos … dZViewItem
Last edited by Crihz (2007-12-09 1:12:35 pm)
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16GB CompactFlash $99.99
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications … =A208-1160
+
USB CF Reader $8
http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=0290
+
Imagination ! this is Free !
.. Who wants to try this ? hehe
**** Please post pictures if someone comes with this project ! ****
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Okay, that's a $108 solution..and yes faster and less electricty consuming than the HD solution but...the HD solution will set you back somewhere around $40 - $45 maybe.
Still a fun idea though. But there's tons of other ways..how about using two 8GB USB flash drives or just one 16GB USB flash drive? Tons of idea's, really!
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Has anyone thought about installing more than one flash memory card/USB stick and RAIDing them to get one 'large' continuous drive? read/write access speeds should be faster than using a single flash drive when striping is used.
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Haku wrote:
Has anyone thought about installing more than one flash memory card/USB stick and RAIDing them to get one 'large' continuous drive? read/write access speeds should be faster than using a single flash drive when striping is used.
Personally, this is my guess for why cheap usb sticks outperform cheap SD cards.
For example, dd'ing a volume I get >5 MB/S sustained write (more like 6-7 for the first GB) with a cheap cruzer micro 4GB stick. A comparably priced SD card from the same manufacturer is SDHC class 2 - and tests I found online indicate that it doesn't perform much better than the 2MB/S for that class.
My suspicion: most USB sticks are doing striping across mulitple chips. Most SD cards are not. Our built in SSD seems to use 4 chips. The more chips you use, the faster performance you can get from a given chip performance. Not that I'm going to crack these puppies open to count the chips (well, actually I may take the cruzer apart to disable its led).
Incidentlaly, this looks like a fun idea from the same manufacturer...
http://www.adata.com.tw/adata_en/produc … =ASDU080BK
Last edited by tuxpocket (2007-12-09 5:35:30 pm)
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The RAIDING in XP has been discussed in other threads. Technically it should work and provide a safer and faster storage solution. I don't remember seeing anyone who actually did it.
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I have stripped my cruzer micro 4g and there seems to be only one main chip on there.
There is a small chip on one side that maybe is the brain?
The guts of the device really are quite small.
I'm not too set up right now and the Eee cam pics of the cruzer I just took were pretty poor but if I get it together I'll post them for you.
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Oh well so much for that theory. Did the light on your cruzer 4G stay on all the time? If I were willing to mod my Eee with internal storage I think I'd use another one of these as they are $30 down the street.
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the sense of scale thing is doing my nut in.. I want to fit a 1.8" drive but i don't think there'll be space in a 8g EEE.. with the USB adaptor on such a drive you could turn it off for when you dont need it - good good good. I download a lot and think this will kill a SSD fairly quickly.. I'm going to test it with a cheapie 4 or 8gb card but i think i'll end up trying to whack a conventional drive on a switch in there..
EDIT: i've just found a 1" usb2 hard drive. its only £15 (one off sale) and it's only 4gb but i have a suspicion it'll stand up to my downloading a lot better than a SSD... Going to try and fit it on a switch when i get my EEE (i'm waiting for 8G in black to be available here in the UK)
crihz, you've put a 1.8" drive in your eee.. is the mini PCI-E fouled at all? would it be possible do you think to put that drive in an 8g eee which uses its mini pci-e for the SSD?
Last edited by Skree (2007-12-12 8:59:36 pm)
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I'm still surprised people are worrying about the expected lifetime of the SSD under heavy usage. I have a few CF cards that are almost a decade old, and they still work like they just rolled off the assembly line. And chip technology came a long way in 10 years time -- I wouldn't be surprised if the EEE's SSD holds up for years under "regular" usage like a hard drive.
And low and behold, WHAT IF, the SSD may reach its end of life? Does that mean your EEE is bricked? Not exactly, since USB ports on the mainboard are spread all over the place. So repairs are probably easy and cheap in that case, and a good reason for upgrade. And even an end-of-life SSD can be read without any problems (bascially it's a ROM chip), only writes could cause eventual issues.
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hello guys , first post in a while , just wondering would anybody be willing to fit my 1.8 toshiba hard disk into my eee , i have all the parts (caddy, hard disk ) would pay around 20 quid for someone to safely do this mod for me , ( im good at breaking stuff)
someone in the manchester uk area would be ace . you dont get if you dont ask
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now all he needs is to make a car battery fit in theres and the hard drives power consumption wont be a issue
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Sorry to bring up a mostly dead thread,
but if my Ipod, with it's microscopic battery, can run this drive (or my 30 gig) for 2 hours playing a video, I can't imagine it would have a drastic impact on the life of your EEE's battery.
Granted it takes up a lot of room, but I like the idea of having a drive that is cache friendly and easily replaceable.
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Hm...
I have a Sharp Mp3 player that i havent used in a long time, its a 20 gb hdd-player.
Wonder if it would fit? I will probably check it out one rainy day ;-)
Last edited by MatteN (2008-07-11 1:51:06 pm)
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