I was going to chime in here earlier, but I thought I should wait it out and see what your decision ended up being, based on Rob's comments.

It looks like you're a little bit panicked about finding a proper mounting spot in your vehicle, so I'm going to throw in my two cents. I don't know what a "Twingo" is, or what its stereo mounting slot is like, so I'm going to base this reply on the following assumptions: 1) That the place you're intending for the installation is actually meant for a DIN-sized stereo, and 2) The installation spot is more vertical than horizontal.

Now, I don't want to contradict anything that Rob said, and I don't intend to. But you have to understand that Rob is doing his best to stay within the boundaries defined by their business needs: i.e., they can't replace units or drives that were mistreated. So he can't say "the Empeg is very tough, and so are the drives we install, don't worry about it", even though it would be a true statement.

Assuming that the Mark2's will have a similar shock-mount system to the Mark1's, here is how it works:

The platter which holds the drives has four soft rubber mounts which seem (to me) to travel in all directions, not just up and down. The mounts are held into the frame via friction- i.e., they "snap" into place in their mounting holes.

But when I opened my Mark1 to add the second drive, I discovered that the rubber mounts had become "unsnapped" (probably when I dropped it once), and that the drive platter was mostly being held in position by the IDE ribbon cable which connected to the drive. Also, I noticed that the IDE ribbon cable was rubbing against a jumper on the motherboard and some of the insulation had rubbed off of it at that point. The drive platter was basically held in place by cabling and components on the interior of the unit. It had apparently been this way for a long time, and I didn't know about it. And the unit functioned flawlessly the whole time.

See, the clearances inside the Empeg are very small. Even with the rubber mounts, there's not much "travel" to them, so they don't completely absorb the really big shocks anyway. In fact, the mounts seem to have better travel in the front-back direction than the up/down direction, making a vertical orientation sound more plausible. The mounts help absorb the shocks a little, but the Empeg is also depending on the laptop disk drives to be tough. Which they are.

I ran my Empeg in a rough-riding car, daily for months, without the rubber shocks being functional at all. This would definitely qualify as mistreatment, but I haven't had any electronic or mechanical trouble with it.

So how rough does your Twingo ride? How smooth are the roads on which you drive it? The Jeep owners on this BBS probably have drives in the same situation as mine: Their rubber mounts might have come undone, too, and therefore aren't doing anything much at this point. (In fact, I just rechecked mine, and two of the four mounts had come undone again.)

So the only real question is the vertical orientation of the laptop drives. Does anyone here on the BBS know anything about the internal workings of laptop hard disks? What goes wrong if you turn them vertical? I seem to remember some folks piping up on the mailing list about how tough they are...

Oh, and Rob, I'm sorry I hadn't mentioned the mounts coming undone before. It didn't seem to hurt the unit or anything...

Tony Fabris (http://www.jps.net/tfabris)
Empeg #144