I've got about 160gb of music on my main Empeg and I want to create another "clone" player with all the same playlists and music.

My original plan was to FTP the FID's to my PC and then FTP them back to the "clone" player. Obviously this will take a long, long, long time (I get about 2gb per hour normally via FTP).

Which brings me to my question: How much faster would it be to open the player and copy the drives one at a time using the player to do the copy?

Faster than FTP, but not lightning fast. It will still take hours.

If you want to do that, there are detailed instructions in the Drive Upgrade Guide on exactly how to do it. You should follow those instructions carefully to make sure you do the steps right. Pretend that the existing empeg is the "old drive" and the new clone empeg is the "new drive", and follow the instructions to the letter.

I dunno, for 160gb drives, it still might come out to days. I don't have numbers. Anyone have numbers?

Maximum best the ISA connected IDE controller could do would be 16MB/s. Halving that to account for both drives on the same bus, and overhead, and you are probably looking at 5MB/s at best. So a minimum of 9 hours for 160 gigs.

Best of 9hrs compared to my estimated best of 6 days, I'm going to give this a shot.

If you want to truly clone a player onto an identical sized hard disk, then do it inside the player, with this one simple command: cat /dev/hda > /dev/hdb
where hda is the current working empeg install, and hdb is the temporary slave drive that you want to turn into a clone.

Cheers