I just recently installed an 80 gig drive (5400 rpm Fujitsu) in my empeg, but i kept the original 12 gig drive in. When I went on an 3 hour drive, hijack's high temp warning came on. Before I installed the 80 gig, I went on an 10 hour drive and had no problems.

So I was wondering if I need a fan, or if I can keep the temps low another way, like if it would make a big difference if I get rid of the 12gig, and have only the 80 gig. I was also wondering if it could be that the 80 gig is having problems spinning down.

Thanks for any help.

The biggest factors that affect your player's temperature are the heater ducts in your car and how it's mounted in the dash. If there's space around the player, and the heater ducts don't run near it, it's gonna be cooler. The player will also tend to get hot if it's winter time and you're running the heater a lot.

The disk drive size won't affect the drive spindown. The bitrate of the music files might-- FLAC files would keep the thing spun up almost all the time. Having too many songs that your database is huge and takes up all the cache memory will affect the spindown, too. You can use the disk monitoring feature (it's in the emplode configure player screen) to see if the disks are spinning down.

If you only had the temp warning go off once, I wouldn't worry too much about a fan. If you tend to go on a lot of long drives and you've had the temp warning go off more than once, then I'd start to consider it. Stu at Eutronix can fix you up if you don't think you can do it yourself.

The older 12GB drive is probably generating 2X the heat of the 80GB, and blocking some of the free air movement also. If you don't need the space, then copy the FIDS directory contents to the 80GB and scrap the 12GB. (there's more to it than that, but the FAQ probably outlines the procedure in more detail)

Cheers

Yeah, what Mark said. Get rid of the 12 gig drive and have only the 80 gig.

I'll try using just the 80 gig first and see if that works. I make that 3 hour to go snowboarding at least 2x a week, so that's why I want to make sure I don't keep overheating the drives.

I'm also running emphatic, that wouldn't make it heat up quicker would it?

Quote:
I'm also running emphatic, that wouldn't make it heat up quicker would it?

Yes, because it eats up ram so the hard drives rarely get a chance to spin down. Also, I think the CPU usage is higher. Having the heater ducts in your car near the empeg can also make it hotter. Set your heater to the Floor position.

Removing the 12GB drive will not only generate less heat, but it will also contain less heat and allow for more air flow.

Or so I read.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had the functionality of hddtemp in the Hijack kernel...

...I know, I know we could just build hddtemp for the ARM and do it in userspace were God (and I don't mean Patrick) intended.

Edit:

Before anyone asks, it is here http://www.guzu.net/linux/hddtemp.php

Well, Mark has put in fan control support for Benjamin's fan controller, which has the temperature sensor on board. Since the supply to the fan from the header on the main board is not switched, then the only way to switch a fan in practice is using this board.

Hence: instead of Mark supporting only temp detect from the sensor, the driver could also handle occasional polls of IDE disk temp and he could switch on that too.

Yeah, that would be fairly easy to do. I should add it to hdparm as well.

Cheers

I took the 12 gig out, and quit using emphatic, but when I went on an 40 min. drive home from work, my empeg empeg still went up to 118 F. So, I know when I drive for 2 1/2 hours to the mountains tommorow, the empeg will go above 131 F. The empeg is mounted above a cd player, but when I got home, the bottom of the empeg felt a lot warmer than the top of the cd player.
So, I was wondering if there are any other things I could try, or if I am just forced to put a fan in.

Post a shot of the install so we can get an idea of how much room you had to install it, proximity to heater, etc.

Ok, I'll do that later, but I actually had the air conditioning running both times I checked the temp.

I found a 40 mm fan in an old external cd burner and decided to throw that in the empeg. I didn't want to use benjammin's temp control board, because I didn't feel confident enough to soder to the empeg's board and i also didn't want to wait for one. So I decided to put a switch on the front of the empeg, to control the fan. I wanted to use a push button switch, so it would be more discrete, but i couldn't find one small enough, so I had to use a toggle switch, that took the looks of the empeg down. Pic attached.