Radius 3000 Relooked this is a field review not a MP3 debate

Now, one issue you bring up is the necessity to double up. No question about that. Does the service you subscribe to allow you to copy the music or are you paying for a second license? I won't argue the NEED for 2 copies(sometimes you need to mix and scratch off the same material, nothing new). But, licensing is critical.

It is doubtful that NTFS will be supported in the future because while the dominant format, its not a default format. Mac is using HFS, HFS+ and HFS Journalled. I forget which ISO revision UNIX and LINUX is using, but everyone wants to read and write to fat and fat32. Everyone else is in the same boat. The reason is that if you support one format, then you risk alienating another user base. Western Digital sort of gets around this with their WD TV Media Player(version 1) which supports up to 2 USB connected media at the same time, which can be basically any media that can plug into the USB port. Hard drives, thumb drives, memory cards(with adaptor), pretty much anything as long as it is a SINGLE physical volume. I have a multi-USB card reader, it won't work with that, nor will it work with a USB hub. Ideally, it needs a single partitioned drive. It reads Mac and PC drives, plays back video, audio(MP3 and 16-bit 44.1K audio files and more). Considering the unit retails for $100, that's CHEAP compared to what you pay for your Radius 3000's.

So, what you want to have them do(and they SHOULD DO) is possible, but it's not likely anytime soon for any vendor. This market is SLOW to change in those regards.

Prices of thumb drives and storage cards is dropping. I think in a year, out of necessity, cards 32GIG and under will need to drop anywhere from 35% to 40% off their current prices if NOT more. it makes no sense to make small capacity hard drives anymore because for the same mone they can make a large capacity drive, adn they'll both fail just as easily(I have had over 20 drives fail in the past year, with 2 recent failures and 2 ready to fail, it's been a real PITA).

One of the issues is that too bad you can't "flash" the firmware to upgrade features: burn a special CD-R or load the firmware onto a USB stick and then do a special key sequence.

How long do you think you can live with 32-gig sticks? Based on your compressed collection, this isn't an issue for you.

WD 500GB, allow for the drive to be formatted so while i invested in $400 in SDHC card and HC zip drive to get a total of 126GB I spent $129 for 500GB, research, research, research, prior to purchase.