For what it is worth....

The Shuttle has a daughter card that contains the Eprom and (I think) the decoder chip, leaving a possible upgrade path via replacing that daughter card. Why the heck would I want to be able to use WMA or SDMI anyways ;-)

The only shock protection is through a couple of foam pads. However, I have had the Shuttle in my Jeep Wrangler (very bouncy) driving around San Francisco (pretty bad roads) with an old Maxtor hard drive (several years old, a little less than a gig, no shock protection at all) for the last month (about 1500 Miles) and have not had any problems (no bad sectors, no lost data). I think hard drives are a little tougher than most people think.

-Mike

p.s. In the Shuttle's defense... I received the Shuttle two days after I placed the order which was probably less than a week after I learned of its existance. I have known about the Empeg project since 1997 (before Hugo had decided to sell these things to the public in fact) and been on the waiting list since July of this year and I still can't get one.