All-Terrain Hard Drive Player

Many an off roader can tell you that CD players are not very functional on the trail or in the rough stuff. Even if they do have anti-shock, the severe jolting of the vehicle has been known to scratch CD's by banging them into the laser or disc carriage while spinning.

The newer hard drive based MP3 players are also vulnerable to damage for the same reason, if you hit a large bump or jump while they are. The major difference is that a replacement hard drive is significantly more expensive than a new CD..

I am proposing a new hard drive MP3 player designed for the off road community. While it is similar to the Neo player and other HDD MP3 players, this one will allow you to cache some tunes before hitting the dirt.

This new off road player includes the basic hard drive module and display screen, and also has an onboard 64MB cache (expandable to 192MB using existing DIMM technology) for you to preload before hitting the rough stuff.

Once you have selected a playlist of songs, press the red Off Road button to cache as much of the playlist as possible into memory. Once loaded, the player automatically parks the drive heads and stops the platters. This prevents the drive from grenading, should you happen to hit a large hole, stump, or coyote while bombing around. When the cache is running low, a flashing light pops up on the screen to remind you to stop momentarily and load up more music.

The actual player shell will look similar to existing HDD players, however it will be covered with a knobby rubber tread pattern for visual appeal.