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7 November 2004
2.5" of disapointment
 I
bought myself a fancy 2.5" drive thinking it would solve all my hard
drive carputer problems, however as often seems to be the case, things
haven't been that simple :)
I have the drive and I have a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE convertor, so
that I can connect it to a standard desktop computer. But after plugging
the drive into my system, the computer just doesn't see the drive. I poked
around in the BIOS, but to no avail.
The drive is getting power, as I can hear it spinning up. But something
on the data side, just isn't there. The computer just can't see the drive.
Have any of you guys had any similar experience or know of anybody that
has? Please e-mail me if
you can help.
At this point my options are slim, it looks like I'll just have to buy
another convertor :/
3rd October 2004
Pre-road trip critical failure
Last week I was about to set off on a little road based holiday
trip, an ideal opportunity to test my new and improved carputer system
on a real long distance trip.
But the day before I was due to setup, I noticed my carputer hard drive
making some strange noises. It sounded like it kept spinning down and
loosing power. Things went from bad to worse when next time the carputer
was started, a message appeared on the VGA monitor informing me that Windows
wasn't going to start because of a major hard drive error :(
The day before my be trip and this happens! What timing...
I disconnected the drive from my car and brought it into the house, to
make a backup of the thousands of hours of music stored on the device.
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| The hard drive removed from the carputer, after more
than two years of faithful service. |
I wired up the drive into the Strifeputer, my 24/7
low powered Internet/Intranet server |
A VNC session later and all the musical goodness
gets backup up before the drive fails |
With my vital files backed up, it was time to think about getting a replacement
drive. I thought this would be the ideal time to buy a 2.5" laptop
hard drive, instead of the 3.5" desktop drive I currently had.
The advantages of a laptop drive in a carputer are many, firstly they
are built to take a few more knocks than your typical desktop drive. Plus
they are *tiny* (as you'll see in the following pictures) and importanly
for myself, they are very low power devices, compared to their larger
desktop brothers.
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| Next to a CD-ROM, you can see how tiny the new laptop
drive is |
Very thin too, these things are very small indeed. |
To use a laptop drive in a desktop machine, you'll
need an IDE convertor cable like this. Which supplies drive power
although with data. |
I'm writing this after getting back from my holiday, which is when the
new drive arrived. So during my holiday I was stuck with the old disk.
But for whatever reason, the carputer had absolutey no problems during
the holiday! The drive worked fine, without an issue... so is the drive
still on the way out? I really don't know. But either way, once I've fitted
this new laptop drive, it'll be better suited for the carputer environment.
I bought the drive from LinITX.com
which is a Seagate 40GB drive, 5400 RPM which a 12ms seek time. 40GB may
not sound much these days, but the drive it's replacing is also a 40GB.
Which is only around 40% full with it's vast music library.
CarPlay download
For those folks who have not tracked it down, you can download the latest
version of CarPlay in the downloads and resources
section or by clicking the following download image.
Download CarPlay 3.0.3
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