Build Your own Car PC Tutorial, Part 2: Hardware choices
 

I am going to give you a rundown of my preferred hardware for a Car PC setup. These are not rules that have to be adhered to in full, if you have something knocking about at home that you can cannibalise for bits, great! Do it! Old laptops can often be a good source of a media drive and hard disk to get you up and running. Here is what I believe is the best that you can cram into a tiny Travla case!
In terms of hard drives, I REALLY REALLY like the Hitachi Endurastar range. The drives are really robust, designed for ultra-tough applications, in the brutal environment of the vehicle, you want something that isn’t going to die when you need it the least.

Media drive wise, Pioneer do a cracking all in one Dual Layer Multi-Format jobby! The lovely Armen and Marina at Digital World Wide will be happy to furnish you with a Pioneer DVR-K04 Pioneer DVD±R/+R DL/±RW Dual Drive 8X for the princely sum of $170. This may seem a little steep, but you get an awful lot of technology for your money with all the formats AND dual layer being supported. My only minor bugbear is that I don’t know of any laptop drives that come with LightScribe yet which is a bit of a shame, however, this drive more than makes up for it by having the coolness of a slot loading drive rather than a clunky tray.

On that note, I am not a big fan of using trays in Car PC’s. They are really very fragile, and not particularly suitable for an automotive environment as you need to handle them with “Kid Gloves” all the time. Slot loading is what the manufacturers use for In-Car Stereo – I certainly like things when they look as if they could be OEM.



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