Took the plunge last week and went ahead and replaced my 20GB DMS with the 160GB Seagate that is available now. Thanks to the excellent instructions and the automated patch (and the new linux file to support larger drives), this was about as easy as I could ever imagine. Major kudos to the gurus that have figured all this out.
Everything was as I expected with the whole process, except on a whim I tried accessing the new DMS from Phatnoise Media Manager (I still run ver 3.51). I was able to access the new DMS and I am currently using this instead of the older Phatnoise Music Manager. I was under the impression that it wouldn't work but was pleasantly surprised when it did.
It's flippin' sweet to finally have all my music inside my vehicle. It's a bit overwhelming but with some proper playlists I think it will be very manageable. I currently have 23k songs on the DMS. I haven't noticed much difference in performance while using the Keg. Once in a while after pushing the Scan button for the first time I'll get a little lag and then the system comes back around and never hiccups after. But that's really the only thing I have noticed. It's been working like a champ.
The only real big difference is working with Media Manager. It took a little while to get all the music on there as I couldn't just grab all the files, drag them onto the DMS and walk away. PMM would lock up. I started out slowly dropping a few thousand on at a time before adding more. I eventually ended up dropping on 8k songs with no problems. Shortly after all the music was on the DMS so I couldn't find the optimum number of files to drag and drop at one time. A moot point now as it shouldn't be a problem going forward. Ejecting the DMS for any reason now takes over an hour (took the same amount of time when I added 3 new files to the whole collection the other day). That's not exactly convenient, but will just have to be worked around. Generating voice prompts with PhatVoice now takes a ton of time too. I have a spare 10GB DMS laying around so I think if I use this in conjunction with the larger drive I can just generate the voice prompts I need and move stuff back and forth and get everything happening as fast as possible. I run a P4 2.0ghz with 1GB of RAM with the USB 2.0 cradle. Not the latest and greatest, but a decent machine. I'm sure things would improve quite a bit with a more modern machine.
Anyways, that's my experience after using the new drive for a week. The Keg has now become the all encompassing system I've always dreamed of having. Very cool stuff. If I notice any new quirks, etc. I shall report them.
Everyone have a good weekend.
