Portable (mass)MP3 player - CDR(W) or Hard Drive based?

[vi edit]

I'm looking at a portable MP3 player capable of playing HOURS of MP3's that I can use in my car. Both of my cars have cassette decks, one has a 6 disk cd changer that is useless for 4+ hour trips, and the other one just has the cassette deck.

I'm going to be making several 12+ hour trips here in the near future and I want a portable device that I could just dump(or load) hours worth of MP3 music onto and play it via a cassette adapter.

I've somewhat looked into the CD based and Hard drive based players.

Here's my list of pro's and cons of each -

CD Based Pro's
- Cheaper
- Virtually limitless music collection assuming I kept feeding it CD's
- Better Battery life
- Questionably longer life span??
- Can play audio CD's too

CD Based Con's
- More prone to skipping
- Have to burn CD's before hand and keep them handy if I want more music than one CD provides
- Larger in size


HD Based Pro's
- More storage by default
- Less prone to skipping
- Size

HD Based Con's
- $$$$$
- Questionable reliability?
- Limited by hard drive size


Can anyone who was in this situation shed some light on the subject and let me know what made you make the choice you made?
I'm looking at this device right now: archos MP3 player w/ 5 gig drive

EDIT, It would be nice to have one of those personal media storage thingies that you can dump pictures and stuff on to. I'm going to be getting married next year and will be on a lengthy honeymoon so an archive device of sorts would be cool to dump the pictures my CF cards onto when they fill up. But from what I've seen those devices are mega bucks.

 

[Kenazo]

The iPod? 10GB harddrive in the new edition and it has firewire connectivity, so you get a portable firewire hdd (also use it for stuff besides mp3's). However it is quite pricey. The archos is bulkier but if it is just used in the car the size may not matter so much.

 

[desy]

LIke this?
They have strictly car ones too. . .

 

[vi edit]

That neo one is pretty cool, small too!

Question - none of the HD based ones come with a cigarette outlet adapter. Can I just pick up a generic one that uses the same voltage as the device to plug it into the power outlet in my car?

 

[desy]

Well The spec on the Neo shows its takes 5 VDC so you could do ti two ways.
Put an invertor on your cig lighter and use the ac/dc adapter with the unit or voltage divide down the 12 vdc and Zenar diode it to 5 vdc, easy to do . . OK one of these with the car kit

 

[Soccer55]

I just bought the TDK Mojo 620 yesterday and I think it's a great portable player. It's actually a pretty small player (at least compared to others I've seen). I will have to agree with you that it kinda stinks having to burn a CD ahead of time, but the one that I burned last night has ~12 hrs of music on it (700 MB disc) so if you're going on some 12+ hour trips, you probably would only need 2 CDs, maybe 3.

-Tom