Hey i know they are a little expensive but i was wondering if anyone has attempted to use a solid state drive for the z1-3?

no, too 'spensive

whats the price difference? and what do you benefit from a solid state as opposed to the toshiba drives?

No moving parts are typically more reliable.

When 32GB SDHC cards come down in price, one of those in a 2.5" HDD adapter might be interesting to try. Right now 16GB is not too bad, but the Z-series image definitely won't fit on that.

Reliability is the issue here, SSDs are infinitely more reliable in this situation (in moving vehicles, etc.) however, you will probably not see too much of a speed boost between SSDs and HDDs.

what exactly makes a computer fast? the processor? the RAM? why cant more of that stuff just be put in to make it faster?

There isn't many companies making SSD that have figured out how to make read/writes faster than current physical disc drives... I have a 64GB in my Dell XPS M1330 laptop.... really, the only place I see the speed difference, is resuming sleep or hibernation and maybe boot... moving/copying files from directory to another, really doesn't seem much faster..... I think it'll get there in the near future.

I think another factor with the Avic, is the power cunsumption. Which I think is why some drives don't work, and promote freezes. In which I would bet that SSD's probably consume a tad more....dunno

As far as hopping the Avic up... You're better off buying a ligitimate carputer, being that you would probably spend just that... I like this one with ODBII interface and a complete windows OS...

http://store.mp3car.com/Mp3Car_Infill_G ... dk-014.htm

Or this guy with his Mac Mini... I've considered doing this to my Mini...since it's not really worth a flip for home computing...

I think another factor with the Avic, is the power cunsumption. Which I think is why some drives don't work, and promote freezes. In which I would bet that SSD's probably consume a tad more....dunno

The odd thing is most laptop drives that sometimes cause freezing/rebooting only consume a max of 500mA while the Toshiba consumes 1100mA.

I'm thinking it's something other than power consumption.

The hard drive is the bottleneck with bootup speed. It takes time to load programs from storage to RAM. PDA phones which also run CE get around this problem by using sleep mode instead of turning off. However, sleep uses too much power. Whereas a PDA phone can be in sleep/standby mode for 3-days before needing to be recharged, they need to design a car stereo so that it uses so little power your car will still crank if it's been sitting for weeks. If I designed these things, I'd have the stereo go to sleep for maybe 12-24hrs and only after the car hasn't been started in that time period, the stereo completely turns off.

I work in the Data Storage industry and here is a tidbit on one of the new Arrays and its support of both flash drives and fibre channel drives that is eye catching.

The Flash drives are capable of 30 times the I/O performance of standard high-speed Fibre Channel disks and consume 98% less energy of I/O performance.

after digging a little more into the Avic, I actually think that there are drivers for the specific Toshiba HDD's.... and why alot of others don't work...

We got lucky with the Toshiba 60 and 80 gig'ers, as they probably use the same drivers for Windows Automotive/CE OS....

I actually think they are "emulated" USB drivers...

My reason being... is that there are only 4 partitions in the Avic drives.... at least, that we see with disc imagining software/Windows full PC OS....

Apparently..there are more.... not only for the hard disc.... but "emulated" partitions for ROM stored stuff...