Upgrade Your Cowon Q5W (and others) to 240GB!
If you already have a Cowon Q5W and are longing for more storage space, Toshiba may just the right product for you. I say “may” because there are a couple of catches. RapidRepair is taking pre-orders for Toshiba’s MK2431GAH 240GB 1.8″ hard drive. Although RapidRepair bills the drive as an upgrade for the Ipod G5, the drive’s ATA-100 connector is the same one used in the Cowon. The catches I mentioned? Well, for one, at $294, it’s a pricey upgrade to be sure. Secondly, there is a special note on the RapidRepair page for this drive that states that players other than the Ipod 5g will only see one platter of the drive (the drive has dual platters) which would effectively cut the storage in half to 120GB. I don’t know why that is, or if it does truly affect ALL players other than the Ipod 5G. In either case, if you get the drive, follow my Q5W Hard Drive upgrade instructions and let me know how it goes because at this point, I’m not planning on getting one.
Any news on this? Does the Q5 see all 240GB?
After some research, some more thoughts: dual platter drives should work, because the Toshiba MK1011GAH you put in the Cowon Q5W is a dual platter HDD too. The question is rather if the USB to ATA bridge chip supprts LBA48 and thuis supports larger drives than 137 GB.
I put a Toshiba MK2431GAH drive in my Q5 and after formatting it using recovery mode, only 137GB are available. This strongly suggests, that the Q5 doesn’t support LBA48 and thus mass storage devices larger than 137GB. I also had no luck with a Super Talent DuraDrive ZT3. It works fine in an iPod Classic though.