Darwin, I agree with you on only buying the capacity you need. By the time you use it, the next larger size will have dropped

If you've got two 30's and you buy a 40gig for $150 to replace one now, then a 48 later for $150, now you've got 88gig. It cost you about $300 and you're left with two 30's sitting around doing nothing, which by then will be worth about $50 a piece.
So for a net of about $200 you could add 28 Gig.

On the other hand, you could get 2 48's now for $400 or so, and sell your two 30's now for about $200.
Now you're talking 36 Gig addition for the same $200.

I'm actually going to wait quite a while to upgrade the disks in my 60gig RioCar. When I can buy two 100gig disks for $500, that's when I'll do the upgrade. And I'll sell my two 30's for whatever I can get. Obviously, that won't be for a while, but I bet that happens within the next 18 months.

The issue for me is Encoding Size.
I feel like I should just encode everything at 320 Fixed. I figure, so what, that's still 5:1 compression and it's only about double the 160-192 vbr's I've been doing. What's double really?

But then again my player is half full now and if it were all 320, it'd be full right now.

Big picture, I figure there'll come a time when my empeg has Half a TeraByte or maybe a whole TeraByte and then I'll be saying, geez, I wish I had encoded everything at 320.

I think maybe I'm gonna re encode everything at 320.
Does anyone have a good argument against this?

I'm looking for something like

"320 can produce an audio image superior to
that which the empeg hardware can deliver,
thus encoding at 320 is superflous."

Not like

"I'm wicked good at mp3's and
I use vbr because someone told me it's better."