I have a friend who has a Creative Nomal Jukebox Zen Xtra MP3 player. She's going through several of these a year and refuses to get a different model. She uses it almost exclusively for audiobooks and refuses to get a different model because she listens to them at 1.5x speed to get through the books faster. Anyway, the hard drives in the players keep failing and I suspect that it is because of the speed she's playing the files at and was wondering if a flash-based hard drive might be able to keep up and was hoping someone knew if it was possible to swap the drives before I went pulling her player apart.
Unfortunatly, your friend is a true idiot in sooo many ways! The reason the break is they are garbage! Zunes have the only HDs that can be expected to last more than 2 yrs with good use. Zens are worse than ipods and the new disked ipods suck. The only way to buy them is to keep them under warentee. That trick will work for disked Zens as well. Ever since they dropped the price of the disked systems they have been CRAP! Of couse there are RAM drives but who will build the interface? I got a 16g Sansa View that will take up to a 32 g SD chip with a 2 year warentee for under 70 USDs. However, 16 g of audio books at 25 BR, which is perfect for audio books, holds about 160hr/g. Does she REALLY need more than 7680 hrs of audio? You get 32 hrs of audio on one battery charge vs a few with a disked player. Why it the world whould anyone be buying disked units for audio books? I guess so they can break! Buying that will be cheaper and more relyable than trying to build your own frankinstine out of Zen parts with non matching parts from a different system. I rate the Sansas as the best players on the market and they are the cheapest named brand. Sorry for getting a bit crazy, but your friend is the wackiest stupidest person I have heard of in at least a year on this site not the just this forum.
