[JustJeff]

Originally Posted by Pete_89T2

With proper shock/vibration isolation mounts, you shouldn't have any reliability issues with a regular hard drive in a car. 27+ years engineering experience with the DoD/Army has convinced me that even the most fragile of gadgets can be made to operate reliably in combat vehicles for a very long time with a well designed mount. Look in the boneyards for late-model luxury cars (MB/Lexus/Infinity, etc) that have built in hard-disk based nav & entertainment systems - you might get lucky and find shock mounts that can be re-purposed. Another source could be junked cop cars, as many now have shock/vibe mount plates attached to the dash/center console for laptops and all the other electronic crap cop cruisers carry these days.

Yeah, I've thought about vibration dampening. I was thinking of finding some rubber stand offs from random electronics, but I like your idea of finding some OEM parts.

Originally Posted by Pete_89T2

USB cable length may become an issue here, presuming the motherboard/USB hub is in the trunk. USB spec calls out a max. cable length, something like 6 feet. Beyond that, and there's no guarantee that whatever you connect to it will work - some USB devices will, others won't.

I've been thinking about the same thing with the USB cable length. Two options might be a powered USB hub or simply get a 32GB flash drive and keep it attached to the carputer and in the trunk. With something that large I wouldn't need to swap flash drives, I'd simply have to take it in to my desktop to update it.

Originally Posted by Pete_89T2

Yup, that and polarized sunglasses will make just about any affordable monitor hard to read.

Excellent point, I didn't even think about polarized sunglasses. Between the convertible and biking, nice sunglasses are a must. The cheapest I saw 7" touch LCD designed for outdoor use was $400. But I work for an IT company that does a lot of repair work. We have two techs making a killing repairing iPhones, smartphones, tablets and laptops. Maybe Fate will smile on me and I"ll find a broken touch LCD in need of repairs?