Hi,

I am upgrading my Empeg with a 160 GB harddisk after a long time being happy with my current setup containing 40 GB. Regarding this I have 2 questions. I will ask them at the end of this post. First some info.
- It is a Mark 2a Empeg, no memory upgrade
- There will be 2 drives in the Empeg, a 30 and 160 GB drive
- I have read the FAQ on disk upgrade issues and I know it by hand
- I performed a disk upgrade earlier (a small one, adding 2 20 GB disks)
- I searched the forum on disk upgrade issues
- I will install about 35.000 mp3's on the Empeg, in about 5000 playlists. The songs will be split in 2 parts at the root level, a roughly 20-80% song split
- I use random play over all my songs a lot, meaning that I would like to random play about 80% of 35.000 songs = 28.000 songs
- I will use Wendy flags (20) and filters (5)
- I will keep the amount of information in the tags as low as possible, only using the artist, title, album, year, and genre tags (all other tags cleared)
- I will (as per the faq) use the builder for big disks, the car2_v2.01_hijack.upgrade upgrade file, emplode 2.00, and the latest version of Hijack
- I will load the Empeg with 180 GB of songs in chunks of about 10-20 GB, resyncing after each chunk. I will do the whole from scratch, so I will start from a blank Empeg.
- I will do it via the ethernet connection, so it will take a long time. Shit happens, but it is not my time luckily

So, here are my 2 questions, the first one being the most vital to me.
1) I read on the forum that there might be an issue with the amount of songs (to be exact, the amount of fids) I am planning to use. This certainly holds for my random playlist desire. I also read that it may be beneficial to apply a 'hack' to the firmware (Patching the Player for more dynamic FIDs, the 'hack' called set_empeg_max_fid).
Question: since I will be using the car2_v2.01_hijack.upgrade upgrade file, is it still necessary to apply the 'hack'? Or is it already incorporated in the car2_v2.01_hijack.upgrade file?
2) Does someone have any good ideas or tips to enable me to random play as many songs as possible? Or in general, does anybody have any general tips or remarks concerning the upgrade process?

Many thanks for the answers,

Greetings from Jaap.