As noted in the FAQ's:

Operating range (disks spinning and being read): 5ºc (41ºf) to 55ºc (131ºf)

Standby range (disks spun down): -20ºc (-4ºf) to 60ºc (140ºf)


So, as I live in NJ where the temp is now 25-50F, would it do the player any harm if I were to listen to the AUX until the interior of the car warmed up? This is my 3rd winter with the unit and have not had any problems with temperature extreems, but was just thinking if I play my Sony through the AUX input is it the same effect than if I were playing the Empeg player?

Which begs the question: If I am using the AUX input are the HD's spinning as if I were using th ePlayer?

Ed


Hope you all had a good holiday!!

The HDs need to spin at power on in order to load the player software. AFter that, they spin down and stay down until music is requested from a playlist.

I have a CF->IDE adapter here that I plan to install as "drive0" in one of my players, with the real HD as "drive1". All of the player files will be on the CF card, all of the music and playlists on the HD.

EDIT: I will locate the database files on the CF card as well, and possibly the tag and playlist files, if need be. Hopefully I can get away with a 16MB card, but I also have a spare 160MB CF if necessary.

This should allow booting without having to spin up the HD (may require that I tweak the drive and/or kernel, but I think I can handle that part).

Cheers

Will this result in a faster boot time?

It should be faster. I could even tweak the (Hijack) kernel to make it near instantaneous..

Cheers

Mark, would there be any other benefits to this setup, other than faster boot time?

Hey, that's a good idea, Mark!

Just thinking... the day CF media and similar reach the proper capacity, they culd easily be used instead of hdds with such whaterver->ide adapters. I see a long long life in front of the empeg... And better performances!

Mostly it means that, for radio use or when not actually using the empeg, the drives don't need to spin up on each power-on cycle -- less wear and tear, especially in the extreme heat of summer or any day in a Canadian / Scandinavian winter..

Cheers

So, as I live in NJ where the temp is now 25-50F, would it do the player any harm if I were to listen to the AUX until the interior of the car warmed up?

Yes and no...

I have started my empeg quite a few times at temperatures below zero F, and it did start up and run. The limit on my player seemed to be about -15 degrees F, where it wouldn't start until I laid it on the floor under the heater outlet for about 10 minutes. So from that point of view, sure, no problems.

However... my hard drive did fail (bad sectors/head crash) after about three years of this abuse, and while I can't prove it, I suspect those cold starts did contribute to the problem. Although... it did get pretty rough usage (bumps/impacts) when I used it on my bicycle .

tanstaafl.

Hi Mark.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the empeg software rely on the scratch partition to be at least 16MB in size? And AFAIR the same is true for the software partition. You could of course tweak the kernel to redirect any access to the scratch partition to actually access the appropriate partition on the second HD, but I think that would defeat most of the benefits of using a CF as the first HD, wouldn't it?

cu,
Sven

I have a spare 128MB card lying around - if it works for you I'd like to give it a go as well.

What kind of cable do need? Laptop IDE - CF?

I purchased a CF-to-laptop-IDE adapter module for CAD$27, from these guys:

adis.ca

Specifically, I got one of these

Cheers

Well, I guess this means I'll be using the 160MB card rather than the 16MB one.

Cheers

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the empeg software rely on the scratch partition to be at least 16MB in size?

But, swap is only enabled when the player is synchronizing and AFAIK the player just calls 'swapon /swapfile' so all you would have to do is adjust that symlink to point to the real HD.

-Mike

swap != scratch

On the scratch partition the empeg stores larger dynamic data like, IIRC, current playlists etc

/Michael

swap != scratch

Whoops, yeah, failed to parse that properly. Never-mind

-Mike