No promises, but it looks like we've managed to rework the Mark 2 case to fit 25Gb Travelstar drives in, giving a 50Gb maximum capacity.

Judging by the number of orders we get asking for "the maximum capacity you can do" I suspect we'll be able to sell a fair few of them as well. That's well over a month of continuous audio without a repeat at 128K/sec, and even larger drives in this profile are on the horizon.

I have NO idea about pricing at this stage, so don't ask :-)

Rob

giving a 50Gb maximum capacity.

Excuse my French, but HOLY SHIT.

I thought my desktop machine was spacious when I broke 30gb last month. With that kind of capacity, I could afford to encode everything at 192kbps.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

I do encode everything at 192 and it would still fit my 60 some CD's of music. Thing is, not all of it I want to hear, so I definitly don't need a 50gb empeg. (I may think about the 25 and add a 2ed HDD down the road if needbe, hopefully the Mk 2 will be just as easy to add one to.)

My empeg site is:http://24.236.3.131/empeg/

I just did a little calculating. 50gb would allow over 600 hours of music at 192kbps, or over 500 albums.

When showing off the Empeg to some people, they ask me "could I fit my whole CD collection onto it?" and some of these people have collections of 500 or 1000 CDs. Now I can tell them "yes, you can".

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

we've managed to rework the Mark 2 case to fit 25Gb Travelstar drives

These new IBM drives are 17.0 mm high, I understand, which is just a few mm taller than the 15mm that Mark1 is suppose to accept and only 4.5mm taller than the 12.5 mm Toshiba disks that fit easily.

I don't want to open up the machine just to check, but it would seem that Emma could also hold these new IBM disks if one were to drill new holes for the disk platter, just some 3-4 mm below the ones that hold the platter now. Not that I want to do so right now, but just in case I get bored with 425 hrs of tunes . . . .

Right? Or is anything else involved?

Henno
# 00120 (6GB+18)

Yes, all you need to do is move the disk tray down a few mm. Of course, to achieve this you'll have to strip the tall inductors off the main PCB and redesign the power supply :-)

The reason it's possible with the Mark 2 is because we HAVE redesigned the power supply, which runs at a higher frequency and uses far smaller inductors.

Rob

No promises, but it looks like we've managed to rework the Mark 2 case to fit 25Gb Travelstar drives in, giving a 50Gb maximum capacity.

Yeaaaah!!!

I will be able to fit my whole collection! (But again, I will probably outgrow it when MkII finally shilps...)

BTW, the unit will still have to be mounted horizontally, I suppose?

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
#5196

How heavy would the unit be with 2 25GB drives in it?

-- Bleys

"If you would judge, understand." -- Seneca