Rio Karma CompactFlash Conversion
My rio karma has been left for years gathering dust. If anyone remembers the karma you'll know how good they were, 20gb hdd player, decent battery and and a great user interface.

Anyway, the hdd in mine was getting a little flaky and i was always afraid of knocking it, so out with the old and in with the new, pull it to bits, make a few repairs from its previous use and slot in a compact flash card. I also changed the 1600mah battery for a 2200mah one. The CF card will also increase battery life due to using much less power than the old hard disk.

The new Karma now has far better battery life with the CF card alone, and is far less susceptible to knocks and vibration. It is also quicker to start playing because it doesn't have to wait for the HDD to spin up. Loading music onto the player via USB is about the same or maybe a little slower. Once the price of 32gb CF cards drop i'll probably upgrade again.

Rio Karma Battery and Hard Disk

Rio Karma LCD screen
The old guts of the karma with hitachi hard disk

Rio Karma with Compact Flash Adaptor
I first used a SanDisk 8gb compact flash card.

Rio Karma with 16Gb Compact Flash
But then upgraded to a Transcend 16Gb X133 (TS16GCF133) CF card, in this photo i removed the outer case of the  card as it fouled with the volume controls. Incidentally the controller chip is a SM223TF with 4 Samsung K9LBG08U0MPCB0 32Gbit MLC memories. The part number decodes to:

K - Memory
9 - NAND Flash
L - Small Classification: MLC DDP
B - Density: 32Gbit (4GByte)
G - Density: 32Gbit (4GByte)
0 - Technology: Normal (x8)
8 - Organisation: x8
U - VCC: 2.7-3.6v
0 - Mode: Normal
M - 1st Generation
P - Package: TSOP1 Lead Free
C - Temp: Commercial
B - Bad Block: Include Bad Block
0 - Pre-Program Version: 0


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