I just recently ordered a 30gig unit. I'm realizing now that this won't be nearly enough space for what I want to do. I know there are larger than 30gig drives available to add for my second disk. Is there a limit I need to be aware of when purchasing a second drive. Does the Empeg have a disk size limit?

thanks,

Please read through the FAQ at www.riocar.org where you question is answered.

What about the new 60gb drives Tony?

So, potentialy, the limit (theoreticaly) is 120Gb

The statements in the FAQ and the disk upgrade guide still stand as far as I know.

Have you actually gotten your hands on one of these new 60's? If so, you might be the first to put one into a player.

Wasn't there a mention of a limit at 128GB per disk, due to limits in the IDE addressing bus, in the thread about large storage (archiving ripped wavs)?

I'd suspect that that limit is in effect in the empeg too.

/Michael

Which would mean something if there were a such thing as 129-gb laptop disks yet.

Of course.

But we might well be there in a years time.

/Michael

Yes the standard IDE addressing will run out at 128Gb (binary gigabytes = gibibytes or whatever the hell it is) or about 137 000 000 000 bytes.

However there is an extension to the IDE standard which allows for twice as many addressing bits by writing the address in two parts. i.e. instead of 2^28 sectors you'll be able to have 2^56 sectors.

2^56 sectors is about 33554432Tb (again binary terabytes or tibibytes or whatever), so that should cover us for a while.

This is all from memory as I don't have the standard here but the basic concept is right and the order of magnitude of the numbers is correct.

to be hopelessly picky its:
mebibyte (Mi), the gibibyte (Gi), the tebibyte (Ti), the pebibyte (Pi), and exbibyte (Ei)

[grumble]Stupid avatars...[/grumble]

Yeah. What Yang said....

Had a bit of a look around on the web and I made mistake (yep first time ever ).

The new standard specs 48bits which will give 131072 Tebibytes. Drives are meant to backward compatible with older interfaces/drivers that don't support the new standard.

Try here:
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2001july/gee20010713006792.htm

Why don't we all just form an agreement to specify MBytes as 1024x1024 Bytes. And of course 1Byte as 8bits. There's really no need for Gibi unless you want to be extremely anal.

The article linked to recently proposing a "standardization" of abbreviations was ludicrous to say the least. They've created more grey area than is needed. There's simply a wrong way and a right way - don't need to muck things up any more than they have been in the past. HD manufacturers will always use base 10 (1000x1000 bytes for a MB) becaue it allows them higher numbers to market with. And using a mix of the two bases, such as 1000x1024 shoud just be avoided.

Bruno

Hear, hear.

Just trying to be PC (politically correct) and be clear about the limits. I think the **bi stuff is a crock too. because technically the hard drive manufacturers are correct. Giga means 1 billion and not 1 073 741 824. It's the PC manufacturers that stuffed things up really.

Well.. HD mfg's use Mega and Giga because they are correct. Hard drives aren't dependant on the power of 2 rule that memory chips do. They can have only 40,000,000 byte storage just fine. From the SI rules, kilo is 1 thousand, mega is 1 million, and giga is 1 billion. To change the rules just for computers is stupid. Kilobytes was used because 1024 is really close to 1000, and they didn't have the foresight to make annother prefix..

They came up with Kibi/Mibi/Gibi for a reason, so use it.. if you don't use it, you perpetuate the confusion and don't help the situation..

The problem with this new ``standard'', as with so many other new ``standards'', is that it sounds absolutely stupid. Like referring to someone who breaks into a computer as a cracker. It sounds like I'm a racist. ``Kibibytes'' sounds like I have some weird-ass stutter.

I'm all for having precise verbiage, but let's let someone who has thought about language, pronunciation, and social acceptance have a go.

Heh.. Cracker is accurate, hacker isn't. Since the industry defines the terms used to describe telecommunications hardware, then I would say that they have thought about it. If you looked around in the past couple of years, you will find that companies such as Cisco are using the terms that you say sound stupid. The standard was decided on in 1996, and only now have people actually been exposed to it. When you hear megabit/byte, do you know exactly what number that is? wouldn't you like to know if that 10 megabit connection you were paying for is 10 million or 10x1024x1024 bits/second? To tell you the truth, I have no idea which 10/100 megabit ethernet actually is, so I welcome the clarification provided by the new ``standard''...

Edit: kinda got off on a rant, which wasn't directed at you really... rereading your post reminded me you were just refering to the sound of the new standard, not the standard itself.. yea.. it's funky, but in 10 years we won't care.. when everyone is talking about exibytes, kibibytes will be like bits are today..

2^56 sectors is about 33,554,432Tb (again binary terabytes or tibibytes or whatever), so that should cover us for a while.

So, then, are you telling me that at 128 KB/sec encoding rate, the absolute maximum storage limit in an empeg player is only about 570 billion hours? Why, that's only about 65 million years before I'd have to start listening to the same music all over again.

I wish I had known that the growth potential was so limited before I spent all that money buying it!

tanstaafl.

Well I did correct myself and it's only 131072 binary terabytes. Either way by that time, we'll probably have our MP3 players implanted in our brains or something funky like that

it's only 131072 binary terabytes

So now we're down to just two and a quarter billion hours as a maximum possible upper limit?

Hell, I might as well just put my old eight-track player back in the car.



tanstaafl.

If you had that much space, you would be storing full WAV files and not 128kbit MP3's.. Heck, you would probably be storing 4.1 encoded audio...

Giga means 1 billion and not 1 073 741 824.

No. Not when you are referring to computer equipment, memory capactiy, and storage capacity. Terms like kilobyte, kilobit, gigabyte, gigabit, megabyte, etc., because they specifically refer to bits and bytes, should adhere to the powers-of-two rule.

Therefore, when someone says "gigabyte", it should always, in all cases, mean 1,073,741,824 bytes. Anyone who means "a billion bytes" is either being deliberately misleading (as is the case with drive manufacturers), or is simply mistaken.

If someone said "gigameter" to me, or "giga-acre", or "giga-mile", then I would expect it to be in powers of ten. But because you used the word byte as part of your statement, I expect it to follw the rules of bits and bytes, which is powers of two.

Technically he's right, giga does *only* mean a billion in decimal, I don't think it has any official change in meaning when bytes are used. But it is obviously a convention that any computer user understands.

Some standards organization came up with units like gibibytes, mibibytes, and exbibytes to supposedly avoid the confusion (as you've noted, sometimes deliberate confusion) associated with the differences between the decimal and binary values of these terms.

However those terms sound really lame and will never be used.

So, then, are you telling me that at 128 KB/sec encoding rate, the absolute maximum storage limit in an empeg player is only about 570 billion hours? Why, that's only about 65 million years before I'd have to start listening to the same music all over again.

Isn't a bit less ? 12 days ....I wish they would fix this one !

So, what does all this matter when we're down to two-letter acronyms? KB, MB, GB ??

The only confusion that I have ever found with computer storage or data rates have been when people either accidentally or purposefully attempt to confuse an abbreviation for bit and byte. Or sometimes leave that abbreviation off entirely (popular with products from the East many years ago).

These new "standards" will do nothing to combat that problem. I don't think the "misuse" of the term Mega, Kilo and Giga are a problem whatsoever for the majority of people. A portion of that majority will know what they're talking about, and the rest won't care either way.

Bruno.

So, what does all this matter when we're down to two-letter acronyms? KB, MB, GB ??

Little b is supposed to mean bit, and big B is supposed to mean Byte. However, I am guilty of using little b for Byte sometimes, even in the FAQ.

The new standard is not to use two letter acronyms.. use three.. KiB, MiB, GiB, EiB...

Great. It'll never fly. Though I suppose on other message boards it might generate intense debate and wars of extreme flame.

I'll stick with KB, MB, GB and TB. I'll usually write bit when I mean "bit" - such as Mbit.

Oh, as I briefly touched on before, what happens to all the people using MEG or Meg? (I used to see that in print a lot, I only use it verbally) Anything computer-oriented without a unit specified should be treated as BYTE, unless you're clueless or trying to pull a fast one on someone. Been using the terms for 20 years, I'm not about to try to fix something that "ain't broke."

Bruno

So, how many quads does your car audio system have? (Boogie Nights reference)

It kinda depends on what you're talking about. When refering to how big something is, Meg would be considered in bytes. When talking about network speed, it's assumed to be bits, though download speed/throughput is in bytes. I expect that's because you want to be able to determing how long a transfer will take, as well as it measuring how much data you got per second.

As for it not flying, it will.. Since noone has proposed an alternative, some percentage of people will use it (me, and the linux kernel). It's kinda funny how everyone here has poo-poo'ed the standard, but hasn't even tried to solve the issue other than 'just assume it's this under this circumstance, it's that easy'. This thread along side the North American english one make an interesting contrast.

>As for it not flying, it will.. Since noone has proposed an
>alternative, some percentage of people will use it
>(me, and the linux kernel).

Well, err, that would be me (linux kernel) who first gave it the behaviour of "MB == 1024*1024 bytes". But I do notice some pansy has since then added "KiB" for drive cache sizes..

If you read the article mentioned in the Slashdot post, Eric Raymond (I guess in charge of the linux kernel documentation) did the patch with support from Alan Cox.. Which one of these is the pansy?