MintyMP3, modernized w/ SATA HDD?

[aqisnotliquid]

A few days ago, my Insignia Pilot player stopped working and I thought about buying a new player, perhaps a Creative Zen or something similar. But then I got to thinking about the MintyMP3 project. Granted, it's a bit of an older project compared to technology now, but I was wondering if I could use my external hard drive as storage, instead of SD memory. Perhaps it would work well if it was formatted as FAT32 (a bit of a step up from FAT16 =D)... And then there's the need to power the drive (5~12V if I remember correctly). It's 2AM here in Phoenix and I'm not thinking as clearly as I could be, but if someone could post so I could bounce ideas back and forth off them, I'd definitely appreciate it.

[aqisnotliquid]

I reread Limor's documentation on the project (as well as glancing through a couple of the links she provided, such as "How to use STA013") and lo and behold... I found this line.

"One nice side-effect of using CF cards is that they 'talk' ATA so it's easy (design-wise) to swap it with a full IDE drive in case you ever need to access a large amount of data (a car mp3 player?)"

Okay, there's that problem solved.

Power? I'll use a 5V Li-Ion or Li-Poly battery for the whole thing, keeping it at 5V for the hard drive and stepping it down to 3.3V for the board.

So then I just need to look through the code. Viola. Problem pretty much solved.

[TheFallen]

Uhm SATA != ATA.

SATA is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

ATA or PATA OR IDE stands for Parallel ATA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

They are not compatible. Namely because SATA has 2 differential data lines, transmit and receive where as PATA( or ATA or IDE) has a 16bit wide bi-directional data bus. In addition SATA is rated at 1Gigabit/sec, 3Gigabit/sec and soon 6Gigabit/sec while ATA goes from 16Megabit/sec up to 133Megabit/sec.

Now Compact Flash is awesome in that it essentially uses a cutdown version of the ATA standard, so in theory, wire up a full 40pin connector and any ATA/IDE 1.8"/2.5" or even 3.5" desktop hard drive would work. However you would need to supply a fair amount of electricity to power a 3.5" 500Gigabit HDD on both the 5V and 12V rails.

One thing I've been really really interested in is an SDHC card based MP3 player. An upgraded waveshield essentially, especially when you think SDHC goes up to 32Gb, and SDXC goes even higher.

Anyway, just some ideas/notes. Sorry for the thread necromancy.