>it eats into most of the cache memory
>and requires the disk to spin continuously.

Mmm.. I suppose it would likely have to buffer on the order of 20 seconds worth of music, to allow time for spin-up. This might amount to say, half a megabyte or so of stolen cache space.. significant, but "okay" on a 16MB Mk2a.

The server doesn't need to cache music for the receivers. But all the extra code in the server cuts down the cache space.

And just spin the disk down when not in use, using an auto-spindown timeout value (Hijack currently uses 30 seconds, or was it 60? -- user settable).

Yes, but the point is that in the steady state a Receiver asks for a new chunk (resetting the timeout) every second and a half. So the disk never spins down unless the Receiver is paused. This shouldn't be a problem, but it's certainly a much heavier duty cycle than running the car-player software alone.

Peter