Laird
Head-Fier
- Joined
- May 18, 2012
- Posts
- 56
- Likes
- 20
Dear James,
My dream player is a X5 with an empty mSATA slot (so that I can add my own 1TB mSATA SSD for $530, 500GB for $300 or 250GB for $170). Or X5 with 4 (four) microSD (TF) slots.
I am sure you have seen the poll result (wish list) for X7's features. Ability to support large storage was the second most wanted feature from over 100 Headfi votes. Maybe you can set up another vote and ask how much storage people would "dream" of. In my humble opinion, if you have lots of (high resolution) music, 256 GB is a must, 512GB is nice, 1024GB is a "dream". One of the selling point of X5/X3/X1 is high resolution playback, correct?
MicroSD / TF cards are still too expensive for too little storage. With that said, if you equip X7 with
4 microSD slots, I will happily fill them all with 128GB cards now. ~500GB of microSD will cost me over $480 now, while ~500GB of mSATA SSD costs only $300 currently.
mSATA SSDs are getting even bigger and cheaper because they are commonly used in tablets/laptops. Currently a 480GB (Crucial/Micron) mSATA SSD can run for 8-13 hours in a Rockboxed iPod Video 5.5th generation with 850 mAh battery, so it does NOT need a huge battery or a super thick enclosure:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/566780/official-ipod-video-classic-5g-5-5g-6g-6-5g-7g-ssd-mod-thread/2610#post_10410434
http://www.head-fi.org/t/566780/official-ipod-video-classic-5g-5-5g-6g-6-5g-7g-ssd-mod-thread/2670#post_10430207
I am with you on this one...msata-based storage would be fabulous. I would drop a 1TB drive in a unit like that in a heartbeat. To make this really work, however, we would need the interface to be USB3. Moving 1/2 TB to 1 TB of files over USB2 is like poking yourself in the eye with a stick.
That being said, I'd like to see a lot more emphasis on the user experience part of the firmware. I am talking about things like more and better tag-based navigation, not skins. Think: proper handling of genre tags; grouping of compilation albums so your artist list does not get cluttered with 1-song artists; perhaps a way to group by composer and filter by genre in the menus ("Genre-Classical-Composer", for example). An X5 with 256GB of storage in it is already on the edge of unmanageable under the current organization and navigation scheme. Imagine what it will be like with 1TB of storage!!