80GB drives - BULK revisited

Greetings!

The posting earlier about drive space earlier made me take another look through all of the resellers to see if any are carrying the 80GB drives yet. Well, yes, and no.

I found this item on GoogleGear. They are one of IBM/Hitachi's retailers. It is a 20 piece set of the 80GB Travelstar drives. (I double-checked that product number three times.) The do not seem to be available individually, but are in stock for the bulk box.

The question is: am I a sick / twisted / obsessed enough person to order a bulk box of 20 * 80GB hard drives, in the hope of selling off the ones I would not personally use to others who might want them? Hmm...

I will let everyone on the board know a) when the arrive, b) if they are the right ones, c) if they install well in the empeg. Also, if all does go well, I will probably have a few extras that I will not need for my player. Do not reply or post on this yet, but if everything works out well, I will be selling the extra drives from the bulk box at cost. Actually, given the bulk purchase, the price per drive (pre shipping) works out to $286.90.

I will believe it when I see it. I always knew there were markups based on packaging, but... More to follow.

I clicked on Quantity Discount on that page and found them claiming to have stock of them singly for $300...

Peter

The question is: am I a sick / twisted / obsessed enough person to order a bulk box of 20 * 80GB hard drives, in the hope of selling off the ones I would not personally use to others who might want them? Hmm...

CLEARLY!

Ooops. Too late on that one... Somehow I thought that "Quantity Discount" referred to more than one box...

Edit: I was able to get in before the order processed. I cancelled the bulk order, and made an order for individual drives. Thanks for catching that link!!!

Those are great prices! Let me know what you do.... I've been waiting nearly as long as you have for these things.

Peter found a better link for individual drives. I cancelled the bulk order and went for individual drives. The link is in this thread, if you want to order. Free second day shipping, $300 per drive.

I still think it is a bit "too good to be true" - I think the projected price of these drives was $450. But, it is worth a shot.

I think HiJack already can handle these... can the empeg software? (when in conbo w. another 60 or 80?)

Somehow I thought that "Quantity Discount" referred to more than one box...

Yeah, I only clicked on it out of idle curiousity as to how much more of a quantity such pricey objects could be sold in...

Peter

I think it can. I remember Mark doing some testing with desktop drives, and it could handle much higher than the current 80s. I think the more dangerous limitation is the number of fids you can have on the player.

I think HiJack already can handle these... can the empeg software? (when in conbo w. another 60 or 80?)

The player software doesn't care about the actual sizes of the drives. The only question is whether your database starts getting too big due to the sheer number of tracks. Big databases mean less memory for music caching, and thus more frequent spin-ups, especially on Mark I (8Mb) and Mark II (12Mb). Mark IIa players with their 16Mb should be less affected.

Peter

I am glad you did. I did not expect them to have the single drives, since they did not come up in the search. They must have been updating the site while I was looking, because when I ordered, I still have to pay for shipping. That changed the second time around. Much easier, though - as long as it is "for real" and not "too good to be true".

Paul, surely you need to order multiples of 20 anyway :-)

Just let me know when someone has an old, used 20-40 gig drive they want to sell!

Nope. I just need 8 to start with. Well, 6 technically, but I like to have spares just in case...

I already have people committed for the 60s I have, but I will let you know.

I still think it is a bit "too good to be true" - I think the projected price of these drives was $450. But, it is worth a shot.

Stranger things have happened. Take a look at the price spread on this page (and guess who I ordered from!). I couldn't figure it, but I have a Fedex tracking number and should see tomorrow whether this is an illusion!

Hmmm, maybe it needs an 80GB drive upgrade!

Thank you Peter and Paul (where's Mary?)! I just ordered an 80GB.... I'll be unloading my 48GB soon to lower my "cost" a bit, so if none of my usual buyers (owners I know locally) want it, I'll be selling it here formatted and ready to install in an empeg. 140GB, here I come!

Update:

They are now packed, awaiting a tracking number. I guess it is real. I will have to change my sig soon.

I just got confirmation too! Thanks for posting the link and letting us know Paul!

80GB drives for $150 less than expected and empeg 2.00 final! What a good week and it's only Tuesday!

wait till you see what happeneds tomorrow.

I will have to change my sig soon

Bring back the cute little empeg icon, thats what I say !

And here I was thinking that the old sig was a bit too flashy with the animated gif... Perhaps I will bring it back... perhaps...

In reply to:

---

I will have to change my sig soon.

---

But you don't even have a sig!

Ah. Oh. Hmmm...

Actually, I do. I use the default color scheme of the board (blue and orange), and the text of the sig is white on a transparent background. Looks decent in the default (empeg) color scheme.

Ah, I see - that's the peril of specifying one colour and not the other.

It's the bane of too many web sites, too.

Your sig here just looks like so much blank space; white is very hard to read. (When I turned on "enable author colours" in my browser, I chose the board colour scheme that's easiest to my normal browsing colours, as the others all seemed too gaudy).

Greetings!

I will need to look at that, and try to get something that will work a bit better... Hmm...

How's this? Change the black to whatever colour you like, of course.

Mmm.... Not sure. It looks good, but when using photoshop to recreate it, I get too much noise from the blur. I will continue to look into it. Meanwhile, I upgraded my text for future implementation.

In reply to:

---

...using photoshop to recreate it, I get too much noise from the blur..

---

The way I did it with Gimp was to select-by-colour all the text, then grow the selection by 3 pixels, then fill a layer using that selection, placing the original on top, taking about 1 minute all told. Maybe that helps?

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.