I picked up a 250 GB Maxtor hard-drive from Future Shop earlier this week, a great deal at $99. Then I got a VANTEC Nexstar 3 Aluminum 3.5" Enclosure to put it in. It was easy to install, just hooked up the IDE cable and the power supply and screwed it all back together. After hooking it up to my computer, I used the MaxBlast software to partition and format it as a FAT32 drive, which just took a couple minutes. Then I dumped about 20 GB of MP3 files on it and hooked it up to my DVD player via the USB cable. And it works!! Woohoo! I'm surprised I didn't run into any problems, everything went so smoothly. Now I gotta rip a bunch of my DVDs and stick them on this thing. I figure I can put all 7 Buffy seasons on it, which should run around 50 GB or less using XVid. That'll be so cool to have every episode available at a touch of a button.

I just wish I could implement some kind of DVD type menu for this thing. The menu system this player uses is crap. It only reads DOS 8.3 filenames, it doesn't read MP3 ID tags, no playlists, and it's kind of ugly and clunky. When you first start it up without a dvd in it, it read the USB port and the entire directory structure of the hard drive. It doesn't take very long, but I wonder how much room it has in ram to store all that info. If I fill up the entire 250 GB of hard drive space, it's going to have a hell of a lot of filenames to load. Heh, I guess I'll find out.

It's also very quiet - the enclosure doesn't have a fan, it just uses the aluminum case as a heat sink. And the hard drive itself is pretty damn quiet. I only wish my computer was this quiet!

Update: I appear to have discovered the file number limit - 3000 items. I'm going to have to figure out a way around that as I can load way more than 3000 files on a 250 GB drive.

Update2: I got rid of some files and restarted the hard drive with my dvd player. It still couldn't find my missing files! For some reason it couldn't read one of the directories, cause when I moved the files to a directory I knew it could read, the files were found, no probs! So there might not be a 3000 file limit after all. I'll have to do some experimenting to find out what the hell is going on.