Quote: Originally Posted by
kshots 
It really depends on what you're using it for. Personally, I don't hoard up MP3s, and find that 8G should be plenty of room (perhaps with a DVD to hold whatever audio I may care for). I also firmly believe that solid state is the way to go for a carpc. While I could conceivably get away with using a cheap hard drive and then making frequent backups to cover the eventuality of losing the hard drive to vibration, I'd rather not deal with that.
I would also have the option of putting the OS on DVD and not using a hard drive at all... but that would mean:
1. Slow cold start
2. Update to the system = new DVD
Also, why would map data take more than 2G? You'd have your streets database and your graphical maps... I can't see it taking up that much space unless I wanted a much much larger area.
I think you are being overportective. There are many many many people myself included that have been using spinning platter HD's, and have had no problems. Both 3.5 and 2.5" drives can take all the vibration you throw at it, and also the shock needed to kill it, would most deifnately kill you too if you went through it. This is the biggest myth. Sure you might get some bad sectors when you go over a huge pothole and the head is reading/writing, but that wont really matter as most OS will move the damaged data to undamaged space and "quarantine" the offending sectors. Basically all done behind the scenes and you will never notice.
Also there are 1.8" microdrives that can take even more of a beating and you can pick up a broken 60Gb iPod on ebay and salvage the drive for like $40, which is way cheaper than the 8Gb solidstate.
And 8Gb holds barely anything, and if you do long trips or even have friends in the car, it is the best thing in the world when they ask, "hey you got blah blah song?". And you say "Indeed. I have every top 100 list from 1970 to present along with quite a few artists' full discographies."
And for map data, the Navteck maps are about 1.5Gb for the contiguous 48 states and the southern provinces in Canada. iGuidance 3.0 has audio files as well which are built into the map data files they read and total is 2.5Gb.