Any thoughts on the longevity of the built-in MM HDD?
 

I know nobody has owned one long enough to share their reliability experience, but we all own PCs and we know that any 'ol hard drive will crap out in 2-4 years.

So if your HDD craps out, I'm sure it will be replaced under warranty for the first 4 years or 50k miles - but someone, please correct me if I am wrong.

Does anyone know if the MB extended warranty (past 50k) covers the HDD? Is this dicussed in the manual or any warranty docs?

It should

It should, BMW and Infiniti extended warranty covers 100%
but BMW has a $50.00 deductible

I don't foresee any problems with the hard drive crapping out. Hard drives are built much better than they used to be, and I would imagine the hard drive in the car is of the mobile variety (laptops) so as to obsorb bumps and movements. What you should really be worried about is the memory card reader. Those will fail within a year inside computers that use them frequently. Although I don't know how often one would use the reader built into the car, unless your putting different music on it everyday.

I'm waiting for the motor that runs the screen to crap out...

Today's modem HD has a claim of avg. MTBF ~300,000 hours. Those are published by the manafactuer and by no means subjected to real life situation. Temperature and extended period hours of use will all reduce the HD life span. The main probelm with HD in a car is shock absorption... not knowing how MB takes that into consideration, its hard to guess how long these HD will last.

All HD will fail at one point or another, most HD has 1-3 yrs of warranty, that should give you a hint of how long they can last. Also, if you notice most of the portable GPS these days are using Flash memory instead of HD, much faster and shock-resistant.

yea, I would agree with the post regarding the motor. I think that will fail before the HD....

:word: That's gonna be the first thing to go.

Shocks from the car as well as the temperture flux, below zero to over 100 degrees in the sun unless its encased in some temp controlled box, which I doubt. I'm sure someone is gonna dig the hd out and image it and pop the image onto a bigger HD soon enough. If it's a standard IDE SATA or PATA drive, it can be cloned easy enough.

:word:

Possibly, but if you use the pcmcia adapter then you can leave that in all the time and just swap out your memory cards. And when the contacts on there start to fail, just replace the adapter. Just a thought...

And +1 for the MM display motor.

Cloning may not be that easy. I still don't think anyones found a way to replace the 20GB drives on a Xbox360 yet. I know there are hacks to allow reading/writing to them, but not to use a larger drive. MB could of simply put a cap on the partition sizing so that the system will not recognize a larger one, or one of a dozen other things to prevent that.

Only time will tell. I'm optimistic myself, because I can understand why M$ wants to restrict that, after all they're selling 20GB drives for $100 when they probably source them for under $10. MB doesn't have that incentive.

Thanks for all the responses - I guess I'm just trippin since I have been waiting since the end of October - and won't see my order until late Feb or early March...

It leaves me too much time thinking about these things.

I look forward to seeing someone rip open the system so we can all get a good look at the HDD.

The difference is like you stated, MS has a huge incentive too restrict and drive hacks on the system as they don't want what happened on the xbox on the 360. The 360 underlying OS and code are modified to partition the drive differently and so far there are no real hacks to unlock the partion size, but you can add a bigger harddrive by cloning it. You just can't use the extra space yet.

Like you said, MB i'm sure, didn't invest R&D to lock down the HD within the COMMAND system and would probably recognize anything fat32. I'd love to know where the HD is in the car and take a look.