I love my empeg, but although the stereo itself is sturdy as a brick, I cannot say the same for the hard drives I've used with it. If left in the car, they seem to last a year before dying. If I'm good about always taking the empeg with me, they last two. Neither is particularly impressive, but that's what I get for spinning dense magnetic platters at high speeds on bumpy roads. The point is that I've been considering picking up a pair of 32gb solid state drives for my empeg, and was wondering if anyone had gone this route? Any recommended brands? Any settings I should change on the empeg to get the most out of them? I know the empeg is heavily optimized for magnetic media, and keeping the platters spun down as often as possible, which does not matter with SSD.

Here are some of the ones I'm looking at:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183202
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220341

Yes, I think there is a thread somewhere on this BBS (likely in the "Projects" section) titled something like "CF Empeg".

I don't think you need to go the full route where you buy full-blown "solid-state drives". I think it's enough to get a CF-to-IDE adapter and some CF cards. Much cheaper, I'm guessing.

It's not much (if any) cheaper to buy a CF card and adapters, but it's certainly more easily upgradable.

Both of those are SATA. You need PATA ones.

Peter

The most recent thread on this topic is titled "CF Empeg" and I was wrong about which forum it was in. The thread in question is here.

Thanks for the replies! CF cards (plus adapters) seem to be slightly cheaper, but more importantly, they're definitely easier to upgrade once bigger ones come out. Gonna start doing my homework and figure out which models to buy.

This product from New Egg listed below is a 2.5" PATA SSD drive. It's $97 (but it's 32Gig). This should be a 1:1 replacement with no modding since it's designed to be a 1:1 repalcement for a laptop IDE drive. If you go this route, you can have 64Gig of solid state memory for under $200.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208445

I haven't seen CF cards above 12 gig for less than $200 a piece.

The only thing I wasn't happy about was the 25M read / 8M write, but I'm not sure if that matters for the EMPEG player.

64G for $200 (and never having to buy another set of hard drives)... I'm sold!

Newegg is selling a 32GB CF card for 67.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211244

I just converted a friends dead Karma to use this 32GB CF card.

eBay also has lots of cheap-ish 32GB CF cards. The A-data ones seem to be the best of that lot.

cheers

Wow, I should learn2click the "More" symbol...

Does anyone know what 'speed' card is best (or throughput in MB/sec) for the Empeg MKII?

I see some listed as 133x and some listed as 233x. Does anyone know what speed or throughput you'd hit before it doesn't make any difference?

Doesn't matter for the empeg itself. 1x = 150KB/s

So what is the fastest that the empeg needs to read/write from the drive?

Not much. Single digit MB/s would cover it. It only does PIO anyway.

I don't think I've seen the Empeg read from disk much faster than 6Mbytes/s; as for writing, considering that data can only get on there via USB1 or 10Mbit Ethernet, anything over 1Mbyte/s would be fine. In other words, I think even the feeblest modern SSDs wouldn't be the slow link in the chain.

Peter

It's amazing to look back and see exactly how far things have progressed. I do remember being slightly concerned the empeg didn't have 100Mbit when I ordered my Mark 2 unit, but that was only because I had spent the extra money to ensure I had a 100MBit switch on a portion of my home network. And now, a good portion of people can get broadband that would saturate a 10Mbit connection and most modern routers are making the jump from 100Mbit to 1Gbit.

So "cheapy cheapy" cards are ok, GREAT!

LoL

I got the cheapest ones I could find and they work great.

Pardon my ignerance. Why is this so?

More easily upgradeable, that is. I mean other than screws holding the drive in place. Is there anything more that I am missing?

... I am thinking you're missing the adapter from SATA (which all SSD drives are) to PATA (which empeg is). I think it would not fit in the Empeg itself. Maybe something could be done with 1 drive only, however...

You can buy CF cards everywhere and larger capacity cards keep coming out. Buying a larger SSD isn't quite so easy.

You can get PATA SSDs.

For how much longer? CF will probably be around for (at least a bit) longer, because it's still used in digital photography.

Isn't CF the oldest, or maybe the oldest still in use form factor for flash?

Yeah, but it's not as old as PATA hard disks. My point is that SSDs are more and more likely to be SATA, making future upgrades difficult.

You buy one PATA/CF adapter now for the empeg (which doesn't need upgrading), and then you'll probably still be able to get CF cards for the next few years, when the supply of PATA hard disks (whether rotating or not) has dried up.

Unless there's a PATA to SD adapter that'd work in the empeg...

Presumably a CF-SD adapter would allow you to use SD in your CF adapted empeg in the future ? Like this one:



http://www.amazon.co.uk/JOBO-SD-MMC-Comp...WVA77XCZT8P3HJV

Such a thing exists, but I could only find this one on eBay. I don't know if it would work in the empeg.

Edit: And this one on DealExtreme.

I stand corrected. In fact, I had assumed they would be nearly impossible to find, already, but I made a quick search and PATA SSD are actually in the market. I could not find anything bigger than 8GB (at least here in Italy), however.

Larger PATA SSDs do exist but the "cheap" ones don't seem to have the correct plug and the ones that do have it, tend to be expensive because they're for industrial use.

What plug do they have, then?