2. inferior shock protection of the drive(s)
Are you sure their sled doesn't have shock mounting?

I didn´t say they have no shock protection, I said they have inferior shock protection. This might include no shock protection at all, but I can´t say that for sure.
However, guessing from the pictures and the text on their website, they have very little room for shock protection. There are two ways how they might have shock protection:

1. The shock protection for the harddisc (I´m ignoring the CD player for now) might be within the enclosure of the harddisc. But when you look at http://ssiamerica.com/products/cj5100/images/cj-04.jpg, you can see that there simply is no room for it in there. However, they might be able to add some shock protection here if they switch to notebook drives, like the ones empeg uses. If they do so, however, they will get considerably more expensive.
   
2. Another place for the shock protection might be somewhere in the unit itself, but apart from this being very hard to do (the whole slot where you insert the disk has to be shock protected, and therefore moveable relative to the front of the unit), when looking at the above image again, you can see that this also is not the case here.

Now, let´s have a look at the CD drive. Though this is not as much in need of shock protection than a standard desktop HD, I still would like to point out that it is simply not shock protected either.
As one can see on the above image, they use standard desktop HDs. Those are much more susceptible to shock than the notebook drive of the empeg. A few years back, when I last checked this, notebook drives where able to take shocks up to 10G in operation and up to 100G while spun down, while desktop drives where able to take shocks up to 3G and 40G respectively. Though I guess that they are more insensitive nowadays, but still the desktop drives can take much less than the notebook drives.
The NEO units are indifferently built as cheap as possible, no matter how (in)sensible the design is. To me, it would make sense to built a shock protected unit with dektop drives or a unit with notebook drives and without shock protection, but omitting both shock protection and notebook drives doesn´t make sense to me.

cu,
sven
(MkII 12GB blue, #080000113)