what is the largest gig slave drive I can add to my mk2?

what is the largest gig slave drive I can add to my mk2?

If you are planning on buying a warrantied drive from Empeg, then whatever they've got up at the Empeg Store is the largest you can get.

If you are willing to void your warranty, then it can can be pretty much any 2.5" laptop drive you can get your hands on. Whatever the biggest one is. See the FAQ section of the BBS on the exact specifications for the disk drive.

___________
Tony Fabris

I believe the 30 Gig IBM's are the leaders at the moment...


|| loren.cox
|| 080000446

If you are willing to void your warranty, then it can can be pretty much any 2.5" laptop drive you can get your hands on.

A friend of mine told me that there may be incompatibilities between laptop drives from different manufacturers. He mentioned "grounding problems" but nothing more specific than that. Has anybody had any issues with a laptop drive not working with the empeg (apart from dimensions) or know what the exact problem might be?

Borislav

Everything we've tried has worked so far. There are sometimes problems with mixing ATA drives, although I doubt it has anything to do with grounding, so if you want to be safe I'd advise going with a Toshiba or IBM Travelstar drive.

The largest right now is 30Gb from IBM, but they are rumoured to be coming out with a 40Gb unit at some point.

Rob

Rob,

With Sonic Blue's purchasing department now on the case, do you see the larger size hard drives as being any easier to have in stock?

I'd like to get the largest single-hard-drive unit I can.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

Everything we've tried has worked so far. There are sometimes problems with mixing ATA drives

When making dual-drive players out of whatever winchesters were lying around the office, I have had a couple of problems. I first found a Toshiba drive which simply didn't cope with being a slave to an IBM: it just didn't appear. I don't know whether it was a type of Tosh we ever shipped though.

The other problem, once I'd found a second IBM drive, is that the empeg assumes that once one drive has spun up, the other isn't far behind. This is perfectly valid for shipped dual-drive players as they all have two identical drives, but if you upgrade with a drive that spins up radically quicker or slower than your existing one, the slower one could get timed out and ignored.

Peter

can ROB or some1 @ empeg tell us what model and drive there using to upgrade. I'd also be interested in the speed of the drive

Thanks

Alan

32gig IBM drives appear to be shipping in quantity. Believe they are 19.5mm but not had time to try and cram a couple into my empeg yet.

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 18gig Red S/No.341

From memory, I think the 32Gb IBM drives are the high spin-rate - the 30Gb model would probably be a better bet for the car player.

Rob

Could you expand on pros and cons of high spin rate ?

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 18gig Red S/No.341

High spin rate offers little benefit to the car player, which doesn't have a particularly high speed IDE bus (and which caches ahead large amounts of data anyway). On the down side the faster drives have lower shock tolerances, run hotter and cost more.

Rob

Thanks, its finically best for me to either go for the 18 or 32gig drives, so its just the shock and heat I need to be concerned about. I could not find any evidance in the specs that the 32 will run hot, however the shock figures are a minor worry. More interestingly the 32gig drive weights a little more and I wonder how the drive bay mountings would perform in the empeg ?
List of available drives, and links to full specs at http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/table.htm

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 18gig Red S/No.341

Okay, dumb question... why go for the 32 over the 30? Is it that you can't get your hands on a 30 gig? Aren't the 32 gigs more expensive? Just curious as i'm planning on adding one of these puppies myself...


|| loren.cox
|| 080000446

Am I wrong about this or did the laptop drives all become more expensive?
Can anyone tell me some cheap online stores otherwise?

Has the "coming closer christmas" something to do with the price and will it maybe fall after christmas?
I've also heard something about 40GB drives but haven't seen any price for it at this time.

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

I would certainly guess the 30gig is cheaper for most people.

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 18gig Red S/No.341

I thought they were rather cheap : http://www.intra.nl/whsthtp.html

Frank van Gestel

Thanx - But they seem to be quite expensive. As I remember they have been a bit lower about 2 or 3 weeks ago. Or am I totally wrong?

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

I thought that Mike had fixed this by modifying the timeouts?

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

the toshiba 18 gig 2.5 drives here in US seem to be around 200. check out www.pricewatch.com

I'm considering adding a 2nd drive to my Empeg, and the IBM 20GB model (DJSA220) is looking nice at $137 US. However in the specs, they use two different interfaces, ATA-4 and ATA-5. I'm not familiar with laptop IDE interface specs, so my question is will the Empeg support this drive? If it's supported, I'm all over it.

-Tony
MkII #554

Yes, this drive works fine, it's the one we use in the 20GB empeg.

ATA is backwards compatible.

Hugo

Splendid. I'm ordering one today.

For those looking for an upgrade, $137 is the best price I've seen lately for an Empeg drive. The 30GB and 32GB models (even competitive mfgr's like Fujitsu) seem to still be close to $400, so 20GB for $137 (plus shipping) looks great to me.

http://www.edgemicro.com/ for anyone else who's running out of space.

-Tony
MkII #554

here's a 30 gig IBM for $309 plus shipping. ARgh... they are more tempting by the day... Must... have....... more.....storage.....

=]



|| loren.cox || 080000446 ||

Heh.. Yeah more storage is KEY. I never thought 18GB would fill so fast.

I avoided the 30GB because the price per GB just isn't good enough ($10/GB for 30, $7.50/GB for 20.) Plus I think 38GB will keep me satisfied long enough for prices to come down further. The 32GB models are out of the question since they're not as shock-tolerant as noted in an earlier post.

-Tony
MkII #554

Hahaha... $10/gig being expensive is just odd. You are correct of course... it's just the rapid decrease in storage prices makes that seem like such a wrong statement! =] $100 a gig wasn't so long ago.


|| loren.cox || 080000446 ||

It seems just recently I paid $300 for a desktop 1.6gb drive to replace the 540 meg one I had for a while.

Hehe... Yes, calling $10/GB "expensive" does sound ridiculous, especially when I look at the WD Caviar 31600 sitting idle on my computer desk, and remember the $200+ I once paid for it. Now I've ordered a drive with 15 times more capacity for far less money, and it just happens to be a laptop drive. But back then I didn't have all this music that had to be in my car! :)

Of course, thinking back to my days of swapping 5.25" 360k disks to get between screens of The Colonel's Bequest makes the mere mention of the word "gigabyte" ridiculous. When I first heard the word at about age 11 or 12, I imagined a room full of hard drives in some big corporation, somehow linked together to equal an ENTIRE GIGABYTE. Now I'll be carring close to 50 GB around in my car stereo.

Progress is SWEET. :)

-Tony
MkII #554

I imagined a room full of hard drives in some big corporation, somehow linked together to equal an ENTIRE GIGABYTE.

We have a big room here full of harddrives somewhere around many terabytes. Last I herd, they wanted it up to one petrabyte, and they may have already done it. And it's all for show. All part of being in the complex with Storage Networking Industry Associates I suppose.

It seems just recently I paid $300 for a desktop 1.6gb drive

Ahhh, you youngsters. The first computer I ever worked with was a Datpoint mini computer, with an absolutely massive storage capacity of five whole megabytes. (That's hard drive, not RAM -- the RAM was probably in the vicinity of 16K or so.)

That five megabyte hard drive (one fixed and one removable platter, 2.5 MB each) was the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet, cost over $8,000 (in 1976, when $8,000 would buy you a new Mercedes Benz) and was so unreliable that the service man averaged 1.6 visits per month to repair it.

Man, I miss the good old days. Not!

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

I suppose I'm still a bit young, although my first hard drive was a 10 meg MFM or RLL drive, can remember what exactly. Had that huge amount of storage on my 8088, and it came in useful for offline mail on all the BBS's. The drive was still fairly small, a full size 5 1/4 inch form factor.

The 1.6 gig went into my 486 system.

Does anyone remember the old Commodore SOB large 5 meg drives? How about the LT "Lieutenant" Kernel hard drives?

Calvin

I just checked IBM's site and they have an IBM Travelstar 48 GB Drive . Model # Travelstar 48 GH. It spins at 5400 RPM - the same rate as the "fast spinning" 32 GB model. (The 30 GB spins at 4200 RPM). From what I have been reading, this sounds like an issue. True? A 96 GB EMPEG would be pretty cool for those that could afford it - WAV files anyone ;) I am sure the pricing is ridiculous. A quick search around the net could not turn up any of these.

pete

I love hearing about these, because it is only going to reduce the price of other drives like the 30GB now that are considered the "big" drives. Once the 40's and 48's become common, the 30GB drives will finally drip out of that $300 range.

I heard the really fast drives generate more heat which may be an issue. Both of my drives spin at 4200rpms. I would guess that the drives be touted as being super quiet generate less heat... (less noise means less wasted energy?!)

32GB (JUST UPGRADED!) Mk. II BLUE
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

I heard the really fast drives generate more heat which may be an issue.

I'd think that heat would not be too much of a problem because:
a) In the car, the drives are rarely spun up.
b) In the home, the ambient temperature will not get as high.

Also, the empeg has a temp sensor, no?

The bigger issue may be how much current the switcher can supply. I'm betting Hugo left plenty of margin, but it would be nice to know the maximum current that the empeg/Rio can supply.

-jim 080000260 w/18G in a Carrera

There is a temp sensor, but it is currently disabled if I am correct because it was a bit buggy and there ended up being no real need for it. I think you are correct about the heat issue now that you mention it.. I guess there is no "advantage" to getting a fast drive because of the empeg's cache system...

32GB (JUST UPGRADED!) Mk. II BLUE
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

you can see the temperature in displayserver by selecting "system information"

Frank van Gestel

Yep, Frank is right. The temp sensor is still active, but the auto shut-down (when over heated) is disabled.

32GB (JUST UPGRADED!) Mk. II BLUE
Detroit, MI USA
www.PfeifferBeer.com

---

Yep, Frank is right. The temp sensor is still active, but the auto shut-down (when over heated) is disabled.

---

Or over cooled!



#170... I got SN: 080000101 12 gig Blue!

I have been running with twin 32gig drives since last november. Player gets used every day, I ( almost weekly ) do a couple of 3 hour drives without stopping the player. It does get a little hotter than I would like, but I have not met another empeg owner to see if mine is getting any hotter than one with drives spinning at slower speeds. The drive cradle did need attention ( the rubber mounts pulled out ), and as I mentioned previously the 32gig drives are heavier, but I think it more likely I weakened the glue when initially installing the two drives.

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 64gig Red S/No.341

As I'm about to upgrade my Mk2 with a 30GB HDD I've ordered one. It's a Toshiba MK3017GAP.
I was holding the disk in my hand while I read that the toshiba didn't work as slave with the ibm..

Does anyone know if this is the matter with every kind of toshiba-hdd's?
I didn't find some jumpers or something to tell the disk to be slave or master...

HELP!!!

hmm.. does it maybe work the other way? Toshiba as master, IBM as slave?

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

Hi there,

I have the same drive working as master and a 30gig IBM as Slave, no problem there !
When I copied stuff to that drive from my old Master-drive (6 gig IBM) it was attached as Slave and that also worked fine - so you should have no problems.
I don't know how to set the jumpers, though (would have to open it..)

Today I built in the 30GB Toshiba following the instructions of the FAQ-entry.
Everything went well and without any problems or errors and as it was described. Perfect work, Thanx!

now here we go with 42 GB...
cheers,

TeeMcBee
Mk2, # 080000143, 12+30 GB

Greetings!

I am holding out for the new IBM 48GB drives. I already have them on order, as soon as they can make enough of them to sell. As the upgrade starts / progresses, I will give a status report on the drives and the upgrade.

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (40GB soon to be 96GB Smoke)