Possibilities of connecting cd drive to mpc 500

Does anybody know what the IDE port inside the battery compartment beside the ram slot is for?

I would guess you could attach either a hard drive or cd drive to the unit.

And I was told that any laptop ram would work for this unit and the exm128 is the same ram just branded by akai.

Ram works... read the sticky and follow the specs... it is just 'any old' laptop ram.

As far as the connector. Good luck figuring out what it's for (probably debugging), but even if you hook up an HD/CD to it you're not likely to see anything happen since I doubt that there is any code in the MPC to actually use it anyways. Might be worth you giving it a try, but I wouldn't expect anything productive to happen.

Im still a n00b to the whole MPC500 but I heard of the extra port inside, now what it may be used for I couldnt tell you but if you find out please youtube us a video so we can all find out a new trick to use on our box's.

The port is a service port that Akai uses to acces and address all the hardware on the unit for a fast checkup of faults. It can be hacked to be used with a storrage unit, but would need support from that software.