Hi,

[ Archeon says....

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and opted to order a WD 1TB Laptop drive for the Empeg.
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I suppose those don't come as IDE anymore? So I'm guessing you're using some kind of SATA to IDE converter? Which one if I may ask? How do you fit that into the empeg? (the secondary drive bay most likely?) .....




That's correct. It looks like everyone's going to top out on 320GB for IDE/PATA. One objective I have is to help see if I can get a reliable SATA interface working for all of us. I think someone else has tried it, asked about it, never heard back what happened.


******** If someone else has done this, please let the community know of your success or what you found out. *********


The last time, Mark Lord made it possible for us to go beyond the 132GB threshold with his wizardry. At this point, the maximum drive size of 320GB is driven by the manufacturer's marketing of PATA drives, not player capability.

I may need Mark's help on this one too. If there is hardware stuff, that needs to be debugged, I can provide that. At least the upper boundary of the player software has been expanded in the last go at this, so it allows for larger drives. It can handle at least 640GB now. I know it works on 500GB, I have several players with dual WD 250GB drives that have been working great for quite some time now. I expect that player memory may be the big problem now with the expanded playlist files & caching. Luckily, with v508 Mark restructured the block size (now 4k), to make more efficient use of disk and memory space, but I may besurprised by something else. I am also leary of the emplode and jemplode, I think I am having problems with that now because it is taking a very long time to build such large databases and I think we may run up against some punt timer somewhere (because no one in their right mind would ever exceed 60GB of drive space, right <grin>). If that occurs, I think I will be screwed, although Roger and Mark have helped me out on that one recently. There are a lot of things to consider and can go wrong with this kind of venture.


Yes, I am using an IDE to SATA adapter. At this point it is an older one. I don't think I will have problems with the on-board power supply (which could bite me). I'm hoping with the adapter and just one drive (the drive draws <1 Amp @ +5V, 1.7W max.), I won't have a problem. Older drives used to suck a lot more current at spin-up. Each 250GB drive in there now draws 1 Amp, 2.5W each, I should be okay.

When I get a working configuration, I will try to test it with a few adapters and publish the information. As soon as we go SATA, I think we'll only get one drive. I think we lose dual drive address capability, not sure about that though. That's one of the reasons why I'm starting with a large (1TB) drive. I doubt that I will ever need more than 1TB of capacity at this point.


I plan to work out some kind of mounting arrangement for the drive and the adapter (or universal mounting method for adapters). This could be interesting since most of these adapters attach directly to the drive connector for Signal Integrity and other reasons. I may have to orient the drive differently in the player, or use extension cabling (I haven't seen short ones), for one side or the other, maybe mount the adapter under the drive tray, etc. Drive re-orientation may require some analysis for X/Y/Z intertia with the existing player shelf isolation design. The drives are 12.5mm high which may dictate some of those mounting compromises.


As soon as I get on my way, I will probably open a new thread to document the process and provide feedback/get-help/crash & burn/look-stupid/etc. I have 10 players (mostly Mk2a, a few Mk2 - less memory 12MB vs 16MB, may limit Mk2 applicability), that I can use for development/regression testing efforts, so when I'm done, hopefully, it should be good for the community.

Ross