Thought I'd just give a little update. I ran the builder on my little CF card which worked fine but my hard disk doesn't want to be a slave to it. So, I'm back to the CF being a slave. Not a problem, I just symlinked /drive0/var to /drive1/var and noticed some nice benefits. The player is much more responsive when using weblite and playing all tracks in a big shuffled playlist is faster too, though to be fair it was hardly slow before. Rebuilding the database after adding tracks seems about the same as it was before since its still reading from the disk.

I was curious and ran the builder on a Sandisk 'Extreme III' 2GB card I borrowed to see whether it was any better in the Empeg than my standard old 256MB card. The disk stress test results show the data transfer rate to be roughly the same and the seek times to be just 0.2ms faster. So looks to be the IDE bus of the Empeg that is the limit rather than the speed of the card.

So, is it actually worth making a HD+CF Hybrid? Definitely not unless you use weblite a lot. But it kept me amused for a little while on a damp weekend