However looking at the RIO unit, the drives seem to be mounted how I would do it, but horizontally. Is this a wise way to mount my drives

The proper way to mount laptop drives is so that they lie flat, label side up, when operating. If you put them up on edge, or on end, or upside down, the spindle bearing of the drive is operating in a position that it wasn't designed to operate in. It will work, but the drive won't last as long as if you'd mounted it flat.

There are even more important things to consider than just the mounting angle. The empeg takes all of these into account. These are:

- Drives get spun-down when not in use.
- Agressive RAM caching of the data from the drives reduces the time they're in operation.
- Drives are mounted read-only.

All of the things above mean that the heads spend most of their time "parked", so that the disk drives are not suceptible to damage from vibration. The empeg does all of these quite agressively, meaning that they've done the best possible job at car-proofing the drives.

One other thing the empeg does to protect the drives is:

- Pull the unit out of the car and take it inside with you.

This keeps the drives from getting exposed to extreme temperatures.

So... Can your homemade module do all of these things? You know, there's empegs for sale on ebay...