Well, I've been thinking about this one for awhile and finally got some time this weekend to implement it. I have just short of 500 CDs stored on my Rio Central at 256KBits and they take up roughly half of the 120 GB drive that I installed awhile back.

But the more time I've spent copying my CD collection over to the Rio, the more I've become concerned about losing the files and edited tag information if the hard drive were to fail...And I've really spent a lot of time lately editing and updating the tag information with Emplode. Except for the release year tag, I've got all of the other tags in pretty good shape...

So, I purchased an extra 120 GB Maxtor drive and a InClose PMD-96i removable hard drive bay and enclosure for a computer (in black) and used it to take the internal 120 GB drive outside of the Rio Central. I used a very high quality 24 inch HD cable and extended the power cable by splicing in a longer 4 conductor cable and a power Y-Adapter so that the Rio itself can be put back together in the original configuration someday.

Then I took my original 120 GB drive into work and cloned it onto the new 120 GB drive, so as of today I have a complete backup of the contents. As shown in the attached photo, I have the hard drive sitting on top of the Rio in the removable enclosure. Since it's meant to install in a PC tower case, the sides are unfinished-looking. My dad and I are going to make up some hardwood side panels for the enclosure to make it look more complete and maybe a bit like the stereo equipment of old....We'll see how that goes...

I'm also thinking that as my collection of music grows on the Rio, I'll be able to have a 2nd hard drive with another 120 GB of music on it. Not sure yet how I'll split the collection between the 1st and 2nd drive, but I'm sure that I'll figure out a good breaking point. Maybe I can put all of my wife's Michael Bolton, Mariah Carey and other CDs like that on her own drive

In any event, I thought other users would like to know about this, so here is the photo....

Thanks, Randy

Not sure yet how I'll split the collection between the 1st and 2nd drive

If you're lucky, it might "just work". The Central codebase is based on the car player, which already handles two disks transparently. You might need to do some tweaking to init, though.

Thanks, Roger...You definitely have my interest piqued there...Since the CD drive is jumpered to Slave and the Hard Drive is jumpered to Master, are you saying that I'd have to get rid of the CD drive if I added another hard drive? I use it pretty regularly at least right now to copy CDs to the unit. Or is there a second controller available? I don't remember seeing another connector on the MB, so I didn't think there is...You're getting me all excited here...

Thanks, Randy

In re-reading my post above, I realized that one statement is not very clear. By adding the external drive enclosure, what I meant when I talked about adding a second drive and splitting my collection is that I was thinking about getting a second removable drive and swapping them to play different types of music. Not the most convenient thing to do, but at least I could keep growing my collection that way and eventually have two or three hard drives sitting by the Rio Central, ready to plug into the drive enclosure (one at a time)...Oh well, thought I'd clear that up....

Randy

are you saying that I'd have to get rid of the CD drive if I added another hard drive?

Unfortunately, yes. There's only one interface in there.

What I meant was: assuming that the code's not been removed, the player will spread the music over up to two available hard disks.

This doesn't sound like what you want from it, though.