I know there are adapters from ide to CF cards.

ide adapter

CF card

but the adapter is $15 and card run from $65 for 128gb to over $100 for 256gb.

Here are 2 other options for hard drives which are much cheaper.

160gb hard drive

which cost $10.99 and
320gb hard drive

which cost $59.99. Would these hard drives work as cheaper options?

To make life easy on yourself, limit each drive to NO MORE THAN 128GB.

I highly recommend CompactFlash cards in empegs.

Mr_Maniacal, I had success with these:

Mounted this CF-to-IDE adapter in place of my hard drive: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0036DDXUM

Used this CF card: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NUB2TWI

Please note, there is a type of compactflash card called "CFast" and it is important that you do not buy one of those. It's a different kind of device and I don't think it will work in an empeg.

I really want to get the CF to IDE adapter with a CF card, but I thought I will wait a little, because I have a spare 40gb hard drive I can put in my empeg. I was just poking around looking where to get a couple of jumpers for the hard drives I have and came across that 160gb ide 2.5" drive for $11. I have enough music on my computer to almost fill the 40gb and I still have 12gb on my original 30gb hard drive. I need to get a couple of 2mm jumpers though.

By the way, I remember reading that some people were able to get roughly 300gb working with the empeg. You may think 2-128gb hard drives or cf cards are enough, but I have a lot of high quality music. I have 26gb of Nine Inch nails music in flacs alone.

ok.

Hey I located some posts that talked about drives much larger than 128gb. There was one that you got a 320gb drive working and someone else used a 250gb drive. There is a lot of information and I got to the point where I stopped reading the 8 pages of posts. Regardless it looked like you got the 320gb drive working just fine. If thats so I could get a 320gb drive like I was thinking about.
Although I am wondering if it would work with 2 160gb drives. The reason is i can get 160gb for $11 and 320gb for $60. I dont want to switch to the CF cards yet, because those are still much more than $11. You may think well Its not a whole lot more, but to try a large drive first for $11 to see if everything works well enough would be much cheaper. Below is the link to the post.

https://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/306417

Let me know what you think.