[Empeg-general] RAM

[Paul Wayper]

Empeg-type people:  A couple of questions about storage and stuff.

Firstly, what's the tradeoff that stops you putting more RAM on board?  Price?  Board space?  Is there little extra benefit in keeping the hard disks spun down that little longer?  Because some of the applications that people want to run on the machine - FTP, Samba, HTTP streams, etc. - are going to be pretty memory hungry, and making a box that can cope with all these applications on the desktop and still function as a decent player in the car seems to me to require more RAM.

Secondly, is there any limit to the number of times you can write to the NVRAM (or wherever you're using as long-term writable storage for playlists, etc)?  I've heard that some NVRAM chips (or maybe it was EEPROMs) deteriorate and start getting errors after a (large) number of writes.  There's a number of applications, such as storing user preferences and other data, that seem to me to require pretty regular use (e.g. one write per track played) over the life of the player.  And how much of this storage do we have?  What about looking into getting a microdrive into the machine to store that sort of stuff?

Thirdly, is there any ETA or indication of when the larger (25GB, 30GB) drive sizes are going to become available?  As (it seems) a lot of your customers are ordering the largest size available, I'm sure they will be looking forward to hearing some announcement along these lines.  While my needs are not that grand, I would like to purchase a player with one drive so that later, when my music collection has grown, I can purchase another drive (which, at that stage, will probably be in the 50GB range...) and continue growing.

Have fun out there producing the greatest car audio product to hit the market since speakers.

> Save the whales.  Feed the hungry.  Free the mallocs.