IMO you will be fine with hard drive mounting as long as you are smart and use 2.5 inch drives. I hear a lot of people complaining over a Mp3car.com's forums that their drives ate the dust and guess what they all use 3.5 inch drives (can you say duh?). As far as trying to replicate the other features of the empeg I believe the biggest one and most difficult to replicate with a homebuilt setup is the docking functionality. You need docking functionality unless you plan on leaving your system in the car all the time which is dumb because this will drastically reduce your hard drive life and increase your chance of theft.