Sure, no problem....I'm glad to help out...

Yes, that USB adapter is the one that I use...No problems at all, works great.

One of my current projects I'm in the process of is transferring 100GB worth of music (on a 120GB drive) from the Central to my PC. It is now on the "P" artists, and has been running since last Saturday. That represents about 2/3 of the music on the disk, so I'm guessing it'll go a couple of more days before completing...I'm crossing my fingers that it won't lockup during the process....I've had a few problems getting the copy to go correctly from the "A's" to the "C's", but it's been running all at once from "C" to "P"...

As far as the hard drive, I've learned some things through the school of hard knocks (or school of experience) with the Central. You probably realize that 120GB is currently the largest drive that will work with a "stock" or unmodified machine.

I always wanted to figure out a way to put a larger drive in the machine and did quite a bit of experimenting to make that happen from a hardware perspective. I don't have the software skills to build a new kernal, or do much else with the machine software-wise, but did try a lot of other ways to build a working larger disc. Unfortunately, I had no luck...

But, you know what? What I've come to discover is that if we don't also increase the RAM in the machine (and modify the player's software to use the new RAM properly), it just won't be worth it. I'll tell you why...

I have fixed up my Central with removable hard drive caddies, allowing me to swap disks in and out. This one disc that I'm copying with 100GB on a 120GB drive is not very stable. I could tell you all kinds of stories about how things start to act "weird" as the drive fills up. After all, I realize that the machine was originally designed with a 40GB drive and a lot less music files to deal with and buffer.

When stuff happens, lockups, etc., you can usually get it to work again by rebooting the machine itself, messing around with jEmplode, etc. But there are definitely some issues with that much music on one drive.

I really prefer the performance of a 120GB drive that is up to about 50-60% full. Up to that point, I don't see any stability issues whatsoever....But as you get above 70GB of music or so on a 120GB drive, things start to degrade (slowly, intermittently). It's not the end of the world, but I notice how much better a fresh disc with less music performs...Maybe I should use 60 GB drives or something, but I already have a fleet of 120's...

If you've got the skills to looks into this, that sounds great. Maybe we can learn something that would allow larger discs to be used, and also improve up the performance of the machine with larger discs, etc.

In any event, I'm sure you'll love your Central...It's the greatest home music solution I've seen that stores the music internally. There's lots on the market that will stream the music from something like a desktop PC, but the Central provides such a great all-in-one solution that I love it!!! Hopefully you will too!

Let us know if you have any questions about the unit, jEmplode, etc...

Thanks, Randy