New Hard Drive fot X41 (PIC WARNING)

[abbiecd]

This is only 7 years late in coming, but man do I need to say THANKS to Frank for revealing the mystery about the X41(t) only cranking out 3.3V from the IDE bus.

I picked up a Sintechi based SDXC to IDE adapter (from Amazon) and a Sony 64GB SDXC. After placing a shunt across the regular in/out, the X41t recognizes and boots (Linux, Android x86 and Windows 8.1 32-bit).

The performance isn't exactly SATA worthy, but the SD card reads at 25MB/sec (dd 1mb chunks) and writes at 16MB/sec (ext3 fs 1mb chunks). And since I don't have precision soldering equipment for the fine traces of the Marvell SATA-PATA bridge, this is a much safer option.

I always suspected the hard drive was on borrowed time, as it sounded like it when it would 'park' every minute or so, but now I don't have to use it!

Again, thanks for pointing out the issue with the voltage regulator.