Greetings!

Got it. The photoshop equivalent was expand. I had tried to use layer effects, but that kept giving me anti-aliased / blurred edges.

I selected all of the text (I like to keep it as text to allow later modification as new hard drive sizes and add-ons are installed), expanded the selection, and used the exact background color from the stylesheet. This way, people using the default (empeg) style sheet see a plain white sig without a border, everyone else will see a 3 pixel outline that matches the "darktable" element - #333355.

I went to the link for $300 dollar 80gb drives and to my surprise found them selling for $276 each with free 2-day UPS. Couldn't resist so I bought two! I may have 2 48gb drives for sale very soon

I was about to order one, I get to the shipping and it's $90.50 to Canada by UPS Expedited only that's crazy. There goes that idea.

Greetings!

No. You will be getting 80s. The price has gone down a bit since this was first posted. When you think about it, the price point for the 80GB at $275 shipped vs. two 40GB drives is getting almost even. And I, for one, would rather have the open drive bay for expansion...

As for Canadian shipping, that is pretty scary. You might be able to find a local (i.e., Canadian) reseller who can get you a better shipping price. I am certain that most of that cost is because of the huge boxes and packing foam that they use to protect / bulk up the box. Any form of express shipping will burn you for large boxes.

Has anyone had luck installing these 80's as secondary drives in a MkIIa? Has Paul or anyone else tried filling the 80 to capacity to see how the fid count holds up and how the caching is stressed?

I'm interested in tossing an 80 in with my 30gig player (though I currently only need a few more gigs, why not go for broke right?). I just don't want to break the good ol' warranty seal, thus deflowering my perfect "new in box" player. Decisions decisions: erase some tracks off CD's that I don't really like, or get an 80?

Paul has 2 80s installed and must have at least 90% filled! He hasn't reported any issues... so far so good I think?

Greetings!

No issues, but not quite that high a percentage filled. I am running about 76% capacity at the moment, but that will likely change on June 21 (and sometime again in September). My highest FID file number is 5120x, where x is zero or one, of course. That is just over 20,000 individual FIDs (playlists and tracks). No problems to report yet, except that you do not want to be in a hurry and get caught with a surprise fsck while syncing.

I recommend you get the 80. If you only want to have one physical drive (upgradability, heat, power, CF->IDE bridge), you can always copy the data from your current 30GB onto the 80, leave the 80 in the player and lock up the 30GB as an emergency backup in "off-site storage". But I have not seen anyone (yet) with trouble adding the 80 to another drive on a Mark 2a.

The only issues I have seen are:

Laura's Mark 1 - the builder code does not use the swap space it created, so that the build of a new 80GB player fails for insufficient memory on a Mark 1.

Michael West's Mark 2a - he had a hard drive sync where the fsck would not complete. It was because of duplicate blocks, and the fsck triggered from emplode could not create enough swap to handle the fsck clear of the duplicate block problems. This was the first time I had ever seen a duplicate block issue with fsck, and it looked like it was trying to copy the blocks into physical memory to rebuild. In this case, a manual fsck combined with adding an extra swap space from the root partition was enough to fix the problem.

i took out my ten gig that went bad and installed an 80 gig with my 20gig that was still there. not a single problem with the install at all.

(Posting via my Samsung i330, so excuse my budgeting of type. )

Paul, until you get those tracks you are referring to, I might have bragging rights for the most 'fids' on a player. (See my screen capture in the Palm Ap thread in Programming - I've added about 500 tracks since.) But, I think you'll have me beat as far as number of bytes is concerned. I only have one 80 and one 60 too.

To anyone concerned, the 80 is the coolest (heatwise) and one of the quietest drives I've had in an empeg. I've had a 10, 12, 20, 30, 48 and a 60gb in this player, so that's saying something. <- All thanks to the FAQ.

Greetings!

Very cool! Certainly higher on the number of FIDs, probably even with the new additions.

Thanks for the info everyone. I can't wait to get an 80. Maybe I'll go 100% WAV on my player until I get more CDs. Hm.....

Depend on how soon we'll get a v3.0 software release, you could go FLAC...

- Trevor

Either way, you will have to expect that your drive will not sleep or spin down. The caching is not that helpful when you have to deal with a higher bandwidth file.