320GB EIDE laptop drive now available

WD Scorpio WD3200BEVE

Would'nt you know it - this just days after I finally caved in and bought 2 of the 250GB's on a "no return" clearance from Circuit City...

I wonder who will have the first 640GB Empeg...

g_man

Gee... they're right around $100.00 too. Tempting, but they are a brand new product.

How much did you get the 250GB's for?

Hmmm...

Ross

$76.99 + 8.25% Los Angeles/California sales tax = $83.34.

The 320's are $111.71 delivered for me - pretty close to the same $/GB.

Good deal.

I'm still thinking about the 320GB drives. I usually let the market flush out the bugs with a new product (although, I didn't on the 250GB drives and didn't get bit).

Having 500GB (actually, it works out to 244GB per drive after formatting for 488GB total per Empeg) is nice because I can put most of my (Classic Rock, Hard Rock, Soft Rock, Modern Rock alone occupy 447 GB) collection on it and it is available any time I want it.

I still have some space for additional music as I upgrade my collection (I use 2 each 750GB drives on my source system for the full collection). The 320GB drives would give me more expansion space though.


I might wait for the 500GB drives (if they ever make them) and the software can be made to be compatible with them. Mark?

For home use (they are all over the house), I still may experiment with the slower desktop drives (with the newer V508). The 1TB drives are really inexpensive and it might be interesting to see if they can work with the Empeg playing with the cache reserve and more RAM. All I need is time...

Ross

There are 500GB SATA notebook drives out now, but I don't know if/when they might release them with PATA interfaces. The empeg will work with them, though memory gets to be more and more of an issue as the sizes go up.

Just for fun.. I'll attach a 750GB (desktop) drive to a RioCar here, and run the builder on it..

Cheers

Bigdisk builder v4 ran okay. Now installing the player software..

EDIT: Note that this is a 750GB Hitachi desktop drive, with a SATA interface. I've hooked it up through a SATA-to-PATA converter board from DealExtreme.

Okay, v3alpha11 installed, some tunes uploaded to the player, and now it's playing them..

Dunno how it will behave when that drive gets more full, but basic functionality works without any special fiddling.

Cheers

Good code is hard to break!

I have some Seagate 750 GB PATAs. I'll try a couple of those when I get time. That might be interesting.

You didn't see any problem with waking up the drive or re-caching delay problems?

Ross

I saw two timeouts on spin-ups -- desktop drives like this one take quite a bit longer to wake/spin up than notebook drives.

The IDE driver timed out, reset the channel, and tried again (successfully) in both cases. The player software didn't even notice it happening (as designed).

If we were to make a habit of using desktop drives, then I'd add another 5 seconds to the spinup timeouts.

Cheers

It can be a bit of a pain cabling those up. One needs a 40->44 pin adapter at each drive, and a separate PSU for the drives. In a permanent install, one might consider connecting all of the grounds all together at a common point.

With two drives, the stock empeg ribbon cable is probably a bit tight (not enough slack around the first drive connector).

Cheers

Unfortunately that's only half the problem; the player would need to be modified to deal correctly with drives which take ages to spin up, as, during steady-state playback, it only issues the spin-up command ten seconds before it needs the data.

Peter

I think, that any permanent install using desktop drives would want to completely kill the spin down/up logic (this could be done in Hijack), simply because those drives are not designed for that kind of activitity. Unlike notebook drives. One could still use the built-in drive standby feature to spin them down when the player is completely idle.

I suppose we could patch the player binaries if need be, though it might take a few hours to locate the relevant compare instruction.

Cheers

Hi,

Yeah, I had already considered the additional current demands and that it would probably cause most of the problem when trying to spin both drives up concurrently. Specifically, when both drives are powered down, then spin up. Most smaller power supplies loop bandwidth are not made for the initial fast load step transition.

Could this also occur while the player is operating with the OS/play list storage on primary drive and the music track on the second drive? I would think it would? The Desktop drives can require a fair amount of current during cold spin-up.

I had also considered new cabling too like the ATA-66 cabling to preserve Signal Integrity.

Ross

When doing spin-ups or spin-downs, the player always does both drives simultaneously. It doesn't take any account of which drive the file it actually needs is on (because it doesn't store this information; it always looks on both drives each time).

Peter

Answers that.

Thanks,

Ross