External HDD

Is there any reason that I can't use my Dremel to make a little notch for an IDE cable to come through the case so that with an adapter I can attach a full size ATA drive (in the neighborhood of 250GB)?

Power may be an issue as there's no connectors for desktop size drives. I also don't know if the on-board power supply can give enough juice to spin the big platters. Others here are _way_ more knowledgable than me and I'm sure can chime in. The only other thing I can think of is that there can be memory issues with large database sizes, but I think the kernel can handle 250 GB. Mark? Paul?

-Zeke

Thinfourth2 asked the same thing here

Hope that helps.

Another issue besides power is that the player software is not designed to handle removable media. In other words, if you unplugged the external disk drive, the software might not function correctly. It might even completely lose all of its playlists.

Oh, I just thought of another issue. The disk builder image software doesn't yet handle larger-than-128-gb drives. Since they haven't released laptop drives that big yet, we haven't panicked about this issue yet. When they do release drives that big, we'll have to lean on someone from Cambridge to update the disk builders for us. But until then, your external drive would be limited to about 128gb.

In that link, Mark talks of having no problems with 160gb - isn't that the limit now? Where does 128 come from?

Edit: Actually I'm confused by "HIjack works with my 160GB drive no problem. The Empeg disk-builder unfortunately uses an older kernel, and so will not work correctly on drives bigger than 128GB"

Where does 128 come from?

From the builder image. I'm guessing that Mark partitioned the 160 himself instead of using the builder image. I don't recommend that for just anybody.

The stock drive builder image on empeg.com doesn't have Mark's LBA48 patches so it can only address 128GB.

I see. Confusion over (for now).

So 2x80gb drives are different to the player than 1x160gb drive in terms of how the builder work with it?

Correct. 2 x 80 is fine because the adressable space issue is per-drive.

Two 250GB drives would sure make one hell of home player. Especially in one of those permanent-mount enclosures. Though to really make a dent in the capacity you'd want 3.0 with FLAC support.

Bruno

I don't think that 500gig is possible because the Empeg has only got 16mb of RAM. Well, maybe it is possible if you fill it up wilh FLAC files... (but I don't think those disks will get to be spunned down much anymore then )

Yeah. But if you've got two 3.5" drives bolted to the top of the empeg then you're not going to be using it with battery power much Those two drives may be quite noisy though and you'll need a nice padded enclosure to shield it.

I always thought it would be cute to get some cheap IDE hard drive docking bays, then you could rip the docking connectors off of them and rig them up to the back of the empeg and to wherever you mount the hard drives. You could then theoritically have an empeg with no internal hard drive. Instead you could have a hard drive in your car and another one in your home and "dock" to them.

More useful might be to use this "docking" connector idea to hook up an external cd-rom. Then you could play regular CD-DA and/or MP3 cd's if you hacked together some software.

Wouldn't it be possible to have the player NFS mount /drive0 and /drive1 from a large partition on a server somewhere else?

I realize that this would require using emplode/jemplode to load the files to the player (which would then store them on the NFS partitions on the server), but it would be possible to have quite a large music store this way, woudn't it? The internal disk(s) could be used for whatever extra swap would be required.

Would it be possible, on startup, to check for the NFS partition on the network, and, if present, mount it instead of the empeg's hard disk partitions?

It would be cool to do this: when docked, the player starts and attempts to mount /drive? via NFS. If successful, it doesn't mount the internal drives but allocates more swap. If it can't find the NFS shares, it does a regular boot.

That way, when the player is in the dock, it mounts the huge collection over the network. When not in the dock, it uses the internal drives.

Does the dynamic partition make this impossible? Could one "build" a remote (NFS) collection of partitions for home use, including an NFS read/write dynamic partition?

Am I making any sense at all? (it's quite late...)

Jim

Sure, in theory you could even go ahead and do ALL of that, simply with shell scripts on the player. For the dynamic data partitions, just create large dummy files to represent them on the NFS server, and use symlinks to redirect /dev/hd[whatever] to the appropriate huge file.

Let us all know how it turns out, will ya?

Cheers