I realize the Centrals are getting long in the tooth but I love these things. And want to keep using them for as long as humanly possible. Currently have four - three working and one whose backlighting no longer illuminates (which I'll use for parts or ultimately devise a fix). Two of mine - serving different LANs - are going to live in a 24U rack dedicated to music hardware. The other good one shall be prepped as a spare and put away just in case.

One of the items I'd wanted to address is drive capacity and reliability. Ideally, an SSD of ~100GB in size could be employed - low energy consumption and not subject to damage from inadvertent power loss. So, I set about doing upgrade testing...

Candidate drive is a Dell/Samsung 100GB Enterprise class SATA SSD. A StarTech SATA to IDE adapter was used, as was a drive adapter tray. The short IDE cables make for a fiddly installation but it's doable with a little jockeying around.

System disc saw the drive, installed software, initialized music storage and installed the database. Upon restart a message was seen at the lower left of the display: "Failed to start silent seek" and the unit was effectively locked up.

The way around this is a cold start while holding the Menu button until the Upgrade/Restore to New selection appears. No matter if 1.02 or 1.10 was tried, the results were the same.

Next, i began experimenting with different IDE drives. A Seagate Barracuda (120GB; 7200RPM) was tried and produced the same results. I started going through my stash of low capacity IDE drives (obtained years back specifically for this project) and discovered the following:

• Any drive in the 40 to 80GB range works properly
• Maxtor and Western Digital 120GB drives work properly

I have an 80GB HPE SSD on order to see if this is a capacity AND bus timing issue or if it's timing only. If the latter, are there SATA adapters that can be used to throttle transfer speeds and make the system happy.

Feel free to add to this thread if you have done similar testing.

Success with an SSD.

The one which came in is an Intel DC S3510 series. 80GB. I applied 1.10 via the CD, did a "Restore to New" and let it do its thing. Upon restart the unit came up significantly faster than it did with a spinning platter drive.

I'm going to see if I can find a 100GB version of same and try it. Should that not work I can always use these as data backups (like, to keep Central ISOs and my music libraries...), Suspect this is a drive geometry issue rather than I/O speed. Understandable given the architecture. Still, nice to use a drive which is less prone to crashes.