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Message: [QUOTE="jdc753, post: 443296, member: 52"] Always glad to help and I love discussing these sort of topics. I do truely believe that tablets and are the way of the future with these builds, but they still have more limitations, or at least different ways of accomplishing the same tasks as a old school PC. I just don't know enough for developing apps, or anything software related in general. For the hard drive it came down to knowing the physical construction of the drive internally. [IMG]http://www.oocities.org/lev_lafayette/manual/hdd.jpg[/IMG] As you can see basically it comes down to the platters and the actuator arm. So since 90% of the shock load the drive would see when in a vehicle will be in the vertical axis I decided to mount the drive vertically, so that the actuator arm would be less likely to come in contact with the platters. the arm moves back and forth as the platters spin, but it floats ever soo slightly over the platters, if the arm comes in contact with the platters and scratches them it will damage them and render any data in that portion unaccesable, and worst case brick the drive with enough damage. 2.5" drives (aka laptop drives) are designed to be much more shock resistant than desktop drives, so due to this a lot of car PC builders opt to run them instead of a typical 3.5" desktop drive. You pay a slight premium for these drives compared to a 3.5" drive, but not nearly as much of a premium as you would for a solid state drive. The only other issue with using a mechanical 3.5" or 2.5" drive is that the bearing for the spindle uses a liquid lubricant. I found that when I let the truck sit overnight at say -5° when I started it up in the morning it would take several pushes of the power button before the computer would actually fire up, this I attributed to the liquid bearing material being sluggish in allowing the drive to start. The computer would still fire up LONG before the truck ever started building heat. Yes I will still use my OPUS power supply. The mini ITX form factor only applies to the physical size, the board still uses a standardized 24pin ATX power connector, along with the supplimentary 4pin CPU power. Ahh, that black ultra box I ended up not using, basically it was a way to expand the availability of USB slots without installing a hub (taking up an existing slot on the mobo) It connects to the pins on the mobo that would be used to connect to the case's front ports. The black box also has a built in card reader too, I ended up not needing half of the USB ports I thought I would need so I ended up just removing it so I had more room. I think you will do pretty good with the android setup. Less likely to have issues with it in a car environment like a PC, and nearly instant startup. I wouldn't have any hesitations of running a headless system if using a tablet. Just might need some sort of a line out converter to boost the signal to the amplifiers to run the speakers. [/QUOTE]