It's been wayyyy to long since I last updated HiJack or loaded any new music onto the player - despite it being in daily use in my car.

Now I'm being forced to - car was broken into; smashed passenger window, bent in and took what they could reach - including my empeg...

Keeping an eye on the local trading/auction sites, but doubt it'll show up, most likely it's in a dumpster or a ditch somewhere.
So, time to break out one of the two spares and getting it updated/configured/loaded, and/or actually getting my act together repairing my main unit (mem. expansion board, smoked buttons w/lights, alu fascia and knob) that's collecting dust due to (AFAICT) busted fuse[s] after a misaligned display connector reconnection.

Since they're only 20 and 10+30 GB in capacity - anyone have a link to a known working IDE->SATA adapter? Recall there being issues with some working, others not.
A quick Look at one of the bigger Swedish stores shows no IDE 2.5" drives, SSD or spinners. Will look at a few more places and talk to the guys at work that are more current on storage though.

Or is IDE -> SD possibly easier?

I'd be tempted to go with this IDE to compact flash adapter or something similar.

IF it will work with the empeg motherboard. Looking at the reviews, it might be a little bit picky about motherboard compatibility.

Cost per gigabyte seems to be comparable to an SSD, so is there a big advantage to this?

tanstaafl.

I've got a Transcend PATA SSD in my empeg. See http://uk.transcend-info.com/Products/No-418. Specifically see if you can find the SKU numbers for sale where you are:

- TS32GPSD330 (32GB)
- TS64GPSD330 (64GB)
- TS128GPSD330 (128GB)

In the UK, Pixmania have them, sold by MemoryC who -- I think -- I got mine from. Amazon also seem to have them.

I'm picking this one up this weekend while I'm back in the States for a wedding. I can let you know if it works by early next week.

I imagine I'll have to use double sided foam tape instead of screws to mount, but the SSD is so light, I'm sure it will be fine.

Yeah, forget about IDE-to-SATA converters --> too much unknown there, some work, some don't.

The straight PATA SSDs (Kingspec or Transcend) seem to be the ticket. IDE-to-CF adapters are also very good, since CF is just IDE in a different form factor.

Cheers

Sadly I have to report that when I tried what should have been an equally cunning wheeze, putting a 128GB PATA SSD in a Rio Karma, it didn't really work. Props to Kingspec for even making SSDs in that somewhat unusual form-factor, but the Karma firmware just doesn't deal with song databases that big -- not even when they're built on the PC and copied on over Karma's pseudo-mass-storage interface

Peter

That would have been... good
Guess you'd need a memory expansion board for the Karma - and a place to put it (assuming it could handle more RAM at all)

Many thanks for those - simplified searching... Found that Pixmania is in Sweden too, but looking at prices I think I'll temporarily go with the drive it's got and scout around a bit more before buying.

Yes. leaning more and more towards a PATA SSD.
But if one were to go the CF route, what sort of speed would be required, or would pretty much anything on the market today be fast enough?

Pretty much any CF card is more than fast enough for the empeg. The only place one might ever have a speed issue, is when installing new audio files during a "sync".

One of my players has a pair of really old ADATA 16MB CF cards, which can be read much faster than a mechanical drive ever could inside the empeg. But writing bulk data to them is really, really, really, really, really, SLOW. So dumping new tracks to that player takes 10-30X as long as it did with the old mechanical drive.

My other players have more modern CF cards, which support 5-10MBytes/sec write speeds. Much better.

Note that the network interface, used for installing tunes, operates at only about 1MB/sec.

Cheers