Living in Silicon Valley as a sysadmin, given that the cost of the hard drive is such a substantial portion of the cost of the unit, what are the odds of buying one "bare", and adding my own discs?

Very unlikely - from a support perspective, mainly. On the base unit the cost of the drive is small when compared to the cost of manufacture of the rest of the unit: dropping the drive altogether wouldn't lower the cost a lot and would then mean we'd have nightmares with people partitioning disks, destroying the unit by dropping things into it, etc etc.

Laptop manufacturers aren't happy to let buyers open their units for the reason that they're tightly packed and often a pain to swap parts in - and the same goes for the empeg.

Hugo

Hi

how about the laptop's that have hard drives, that are in special bays (like cd-rom or floppy) and which you can change to put another device or so in ? i think that would be a good solution for the problem of people who are destroying the units when they open them.

L8r
Martin

This isn't really possible. Apart from the problems of lack of space to put an opening bay (no room on the front or the back of the unit, and the sides are fairly structural) the drives are held in a shock-mounted bay inside the unit. Ok, it'd be possible if we had a *lot* of money to throw at the engineering of the unit (maybe a bay holding the shockmount and the drive?) but this is non-trivial.

The connector design for two IDE busses could be fun too, as it would have to dock without opening the unit.

Hugo

As I mentioned in a previous post about warranty support, it is inevitable that a hard drive will fail sometime. With only a 6 month warranty in the US there's a good chance it will fail after the warranty has expired. Is it absolutely impossible to replace the drives without assistance from empeg, or can it be done with care and caution if you understand what you're doing?

It can be done with care. The main worry is from product liability - if we allow user-replacable drives we could leave ourselves open to people hurting themselves when replacing them (there's a 60v PSU in there).

Hugo