5mm laptop hard disks from Western Digital

http://www.wd.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=df55432a-a89f-40fc-81f0-ca9bd8b5d771

Wonder what it would take to be able to get four of these working in the Empeg Car chassis, stacking two atop each other on each side of the tray. :-)

Nice! But I'm guessing the necessary 4 SATA to IDE converters would take up too much space. Pity, it would be cool though!

That is slim! But those drives 'only' max out at 500GB. You'd be better off with one (or two!) WD20NPVT 2TB 15mm drives.

I know the builder has memory issues with drives over around 60GB or so, but say you built the partitions and filesystem manually on two 2TB drives, would a 4TB Empeg actually work? EXT2 can go up to 2TB, so that is promising. It would be space for over 1,000,000 tracks or so of typical MP3s. I wonder how big the player database can get before the Empeg stops having space for it? Would Emplode be able to add that amount of music in the first place? If it didn't barf, how long would adding that amount of music to the player actually take?

I feel like this is something that needs to be tried out.

It has been tried. There's quite an extensive body of knowledge on putting large disks into the player. pgrzelak was one of the first to start. Search around for his posts on large disks. IIRC, the problem isn't the player database, or Emplode -- it's the limited amount of RAM available on the player for manipulating the database, in conjunction with limitations in the player, on how many FIDs you can keep in a playlist (the max is 43648, thanks to Mark).

My memory is, perhaps, not so good. It was Ross Wellington, that started with a 1TB drive. I'm not sure if anyone has tried larger. The FAQ points you to this thread, which is a good discussion of the limitations of large databases.

Hi,

I tried different size drives, different SATA adapters, some would stomp on the Ethernet Port, some wouldn't work with Emplode, manual build of database topped out too, etc...

Urry has also tried to get it working. It sounded like he may have found something that may work. Early in the saga of Big Disk Builders, I thought Mark had created a Hijack that allowed 3.5 inch PATA drives, (something about the spin-up delay was a problem).

Mark could comment some more on this. Mark really advanced us to where we are now with twin 320GB drives. That was hard. I would like to get this all working too, but, I think we wore Mark out!

Ross Wellington

Wow, some great info on that thread. Thanks!