NomadJukebox.NET

Until now, we've only been talking about the Nomad Jukebox as it comes stock from Creative Labs and while there are more than a few problems with the Jukebox itself, one thing we haven't touched upon is the 6GB of storage.

640KB should be enough for everyone

Although six gigabytes provides adequate space for a modest collection, it's still quite easy to fill up that space if you use 320kbps MP3s or just store full resolution WAV files. A small company has recognized this limitation, and come up with a 20GB and 30GB aftermarket upgrade.

Nomadjukebox.net, which has no affiliation with Creative Labs, offers a 20 or 30GB hard drive upgrade. The drives, manufactured by Fujitsu, come preformatted for the Nomad Jukebox and so you need only swap the drives. If you ship your unit to them, they will even provide a free install. Moreover, you can even buy a Nomad Jukebox preinstalled with the larger hard drives if you don't want to bother shopping for them separately or having a leftover 6GB drive.

In our testing we found the upgrades to be reliable with no ill effects. Battery life remained strong in the 3-hour range even with high-bitrate MP3s.

What if I wanted to do it by myself?

Right now, NomadJukebox.net is the only e-tailer selling these upgrades, but you can actually do it yourself as well. The Jukebox uses a standard 2.5" laptop hard drive, but the tricky part is in formatting the drive correctly. Creative Labs uses a proprietary file system and OS. To get an aftermarket hard drive working, you will need two 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapters, and software that will do a blind bit-by-bit copy of the hard drive. After copying the first 16 megabytes or so, you can swap the physical drives and format the drive on the Nomad Jukebox itself.

Given the amount of labor required for this upgrade and cost of IDE adapters, we think that NomadJukebox.net upgrade are competitively priced especially when you consider the free shipping. Moreover, you don't have to worry about finding a compatible hard drive as NomadJukebox.NET has taken the time to research hard drives that are compatible and energy efficient. That is, while IBM DeskStar 75GXP and 60GXP are amazing desktop hard drives, it actually turns out that the Nomad Jukebox does not like the equivalent IBM TravelStar drives. We are not qualified to make any comments about the NomadJukebox.NET store, but the product from NomadJukebox.NET is solid.