How long does the warranty last? I want to know how long a I'll have to go without adding a hard drive :)

Rob, did I read right that it will be much harder to add a hard drive on the Mark 2? I thought I read that somewhere.

The mk2 only has one ide bus, so the second drive has to be slave. We did toy with the idea (for cost reasons) of having a single drive cable on single drive empegs, but in the end we have gone for a dual drive cable on all units, which means all you need to fit another drive is a link for the slave select and some short M3 screws.

Hugo

At the moment the US warranty is 6 months and the rest of the world is 12 months. I realise this sounds a little unfair, but it was due to the US support structure which is provided by an independent company.

We are now restructuring and it has been decided that the Mark 2 will ship with a standard 12 month warranty throughout the world.

Rob

Huh? My empeg warrenty (shipped to New Zealand) says 6 months not 12. Has it been extended to 12 months? Just the encoragement i needed to resist buying that xtra HDD and wait till prices have dropped more.

The wrong warranty must have been put in the box - NZ gets 12 months. Sorry for the confusion.

Rob

we have gone for a dual drive cable on all units

Does this also mean that you'll store the two disks on top of each other in Mark2? (I can't imagine how a single cable would run across two HDDs mounted next to each other as in Mark1)

Henno
# 00120 (6GB+18)

No, they are side-by-side, with some origami-style cable folding going on over the top of the drives :)

Hugo

No, they are side-by-side, with some origami-style cable folding going on over the top of the drives :)

Although I don't anticipate your product will have any problems with doing it that way, I have a cautionary tale to tell regarding the origami thing...

I work for a small division of a larger company. We develop software that is distributed to more than 1000 company branches worldwide. A few years ago, there was a big rollout that involved both new software and new machines. The new machines were Dell Pentium 90's and 100's (the Optiplex XL-590 and XL-5100 models to be exact).

These were "pizza-box" desktop cases, with two over/under drive bays on the front. When we placed the order with Dell, we specified that the CD-ROM must occupy the top bay rather than the bottom one. This was necessary: The way the computers were placed in the branches, the keyboards were directly in front of the cases, so if you put the CD-ROM on the bottom, you'd be unable to open the CD tray because the keyboard was in the way. It was OK to put the floppy drive in the bottom bay because it was never used. Our software ran from the CD-ROM, so we needed that bay to be accesible.

Well, when the Dell folks assembled the systems, they chose to run the IDE CD-ROM cables up over the top of the drives and do some origami-style folding. This was not necessary-- careful cable routing could have allowed the cables to run behind the drives comfortably-- but it was easier for the assembly techs to do the over-the-top origami thing.

What they didn't take into account was this: When the system was closed up, the origami part of the cable is sandwiched tightly between the drive mounting frame and the top shell of the pizza-box case. And in the branches, they set the monitors directly atop the pizza-box cases.

So, when we got all sorts of odd reports of errors in our software that we couldn't reproduce, we pulled our hair out trying to locate our bugs. Almost all of the errors sounded like software errors, such as "Out of memory". We couldn't find anything wrong with the software, though.

I had one of the branches send us a system that was reporting trouble, and when we got it, the system worked fine. Of course, I hadn't set the monitor on top of the case yet. It sat there for at least a week before I had to rearrange my desk and the monitor ended up atop the case. Magically, all the errors started appearing on the system.

I looked inside and discovered that the weight of the monitor crushed the origami-folded cable between the shell and the drive mounting frame. There was visible damage to the cable in some spots. All I had to do to solve the problem was to unfold the cable and route it more carefully so that it wouldn't get squished. The machine ran fine after that and we sent it back to the branch.

The real difficulty was convincing the corporate assets department that their beloved supplier had screwed up royally, and that our software wasn't at fault. I spent about a man-month dealing with the problem, and it was never solved 100 percent. Reports of this very problem in the branches continue to trickle in to this day...

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

There's plenty of room for the folding to fit in - we made sure of this :)

Hugo

Reminds me of a similar tale told to me by a Datapoint computer tech...

Big installation, climate controlled computer room, raised floor so all the cables were hidden out of the way. New hard drive installed in a mini-computer, everything worked fine, the tech leaves.

By the time he's back to his office, he has message the new hard drive has failed. He goes back into the computer room with the system boss, and the hard drive works fine.

They repeat this little dance two or three times before they figure out that there is a loose data cable to the hard drive (this was back in the days when a 10 MB hard drive was the size of a two drawer file cabinet and weighed 200 pounds!) and that when there were two people standing on the raised computer room floor it depressed the floor just enough to tighten the cable and make the connection.

Who'd have thunk it?

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Imagine having a couple of those in you car dash