I also spent some time getting my empeg up and running again over Christmas, as it happens. I'd forgotten how much I love the interface and the crisp VFD display!

So far, I'm also one of the lucky few having no issues with a SATA SSD. I bought a cheap adapter over a year ago to convert an old uSATA laptop drive to 44 pin IDE, with the plan of using it in the empeg, just assuming it would work.

When I actually came on the forum about three weeks ago to remind myself how to install the player and Hijack, I saw all the issues with SATA drives, and figured it would be unlikely to work. I decided to go through the process of installation on the basis that it would give me some confidence that the empeg hardware was still working before buying a CF card, and to my surprise, everything worked flawlessly with the SATA SSD. It's now been through multiple reboots/power offs, has about 50GB of music loaded in multiple syncs, and continues to behave just as expected.

Possibilities that I can see:

- It's actually broken in some way and I just haven't noticed yet.
- The adapter I'm using is better than most. It is, out of sheer coincidence as I just picked a random one, using a JM20330 chip, the same as Mark found worked.
- The changes Mark made in Hijack v526 have indeed made more SSDs work.

Probably not much help, but just another data point to add to the set. A CF adapter is definitely still the safest bet if you just want the empeg to reliably work with a solid-state drive.

P.S. Mark's new Big Disk Builder image is amazing! I hadn't quite appreciated everything it was doing at the time, so I was very surprised to find Hijack and everything else just there and waiting when the process completed!