Hey guys,

I've recently been salivating over the thought of a new C3100 and investigating ways to upgrade it. Seeing as my iPod battery is about to die I was wondering if anybody has tried using the 1.8" drive in a Zaurus?

I'd imagine it follows the CF protocol and therefore it would be just (!) a case of finding a 1.8 -> 3.5 inch adapter.

Imagine a 15Gb Zaurus. I've had desktops with less than that.

The iPods don't have "normal" connectors. The mini has a cf formfactor drive but it doesn't have a normal cf controller. The larger iPods have what looks like cf pinouts but they are different as well. So unless you have one of the first gen iPod mini's it won't work.

Yes, I don't think it would work, but I have often wondered why someone hasn't put one of the same drives used in the iPods into a PDA.

Some ideas:
* Apple might be the lead customer of the drive manufacturer and has exclusivity
* it takes 9-12 moonths to develop a new PDA and the drive might not have been available back then

-- hns

do as i am waiting to do, wait till the > 10GBGB microdrives come out, repartion and copy fies accross

one thing you might want to note, CF microdrives are only 1" accross so ther is not enogh room, and that hard drive uses IDE not CF, CF has an IDE emulation mode but its not pin for pin, you need an adaptor and its only in use if you plug a CF card into the ide bus, not if you plug an ide hard drive intothe CF bus

there should be 20GB microdrives out next year acording to rumours, or you could use the same chips as are in the nano and get 4GB of flash by resoldering the flash chips in your PDA turns out they are pin compatible and sumsang ships product samples.

I know that's not the case, since any number of mp3 players use the same type of drives, and so do some palmtop computers.



Well, the iPod has been around since 2001, so I would think would be sufficient lead time. I think the actual reason is simply that PDA manufacturers don't see a market. There are only two PDAs with internal microdrives that I know of, and it may just be that people think PDA users don't want that much storage. But the Zaurus is really more of a mini-laptop than a PDA, so I would think it or something similar to it would benefit from more storage. There might be technical issues involved as well.

Probably has something to do with battery life. I don't have one but how long can the Z's and Palms with them run?

Was tempted to open her up and have a look for myself, but after reading here it doesn't look so hopeful. Seems like a waste though.

As for battery life, my new iPod lasts ages, so can't be that. Didn't know they had different connectors to CF cards. May be a deliberate ploy to keep CF card prices high

Archos has. Their PMA430 PDA has a 1.8" 30GB harddisk (like the ipod). It runs Linux and Qtopia. Why this doesn't get more attention on this forum is beyond me, considering it can run a good portion of Zaurus apps. The screen is kind of lacking with only a 320x240 resolution and lacks a keyboard, but other than that, it's a Z with a 30GB harddisk. Costs about the same as a Palm LifeDrive, last I checked.

Interestinger and interestinger. So it begs the obvious question why can't these cards be bought in CF format? something smells fishy.

They can be bought with regular cf card interfaces. I can buy a new mac mini for the same price though.

i should clarify, there is only one type of CF connector, BUT you can plug it into the ide bus if you build an adaptor, however you cant plug an IDE hard drive into the CF socket, even with an adaptor

the adaptor consists of a PCB with a cf socket on one end and an ide header on the other, shows up as a hard drive under windows (a true hard drive no usb emulation so you can even use the windows xp installer to install XP to a CF card)

What pins differ between a CF card in 'CF mode' and one in 'IDE' mode?

I know there are adapters that connect IDE drives to PCMCIA, and people have used them with Cf to PCMCIA adapter on Windows CE 3/Pocket PC 2002 devices with a special driver (an extension of the built-in 'ATADISK' driver). Some people on this forum were talking about the possibility of using an IDE disk via the CF slot in a Z, with the main hurdle in thier logic being the driver and power.



The fact that 1.8" drives are bigger than CF cards. There are two types of 1.8" drives. One, like in the larger iPod, looks like a PCCard but has a different interface, which is unique to it. The second looks like a laptop drive cut in half (across width) and uses 44-pin IDE, like laptop drives.

Now what was really fishy, and I'm not sure how true this is now, but you could buy a 4GB MP3 player that used a standard CF microdrive inside for less than you could buy a 2GB CF microdrive by itself.

The 320x240 screen was a show stopper for me, otherwise I'd have bought one. Apparently also some people have had cracked cases. I think its still a "beta" product.... But with a decent screen I'd be willing to try one out.

More on topic, is there a definite reason why ipod hard disks can't be hacked to fit into the Z 3x00? If the pin out is different would it be possible to make an adaptor?

Emil

it was my understanding that those pcmcia cards had a IDE to PCMCIA bridge chip inside of them, considering that the PCMCIA card spec was ISA based it was probley a modifed ISA card in a new package

when you hold one of the pins high (cant remeber which) all the pins switch to IDE mode, so most pins have a second use for when its in IDE mode. the reason that the driver would work is that it would be easir to make an ide hard drive show up as a compact flash card rather than develop a driver specfically for it, the CF ATADSK interface is also tightly coupled with the ATA IDE spec anyway

you might as well give it a go as there is very little that can go wrong. not sure about the power requiremnts but the c3x00's microdrives consume about 1 watt anyway. the latest generation of microdirves consume about 0.7 watt

what you really need to know is if it has a CF interface and wether or not it uses it, if it uses an ide one you might run into some problems. it woulnednt be too hard to make a CF to IDE adaptor, it would be about one or two chips and a couple of resistors, but you would need an external battery pack for anything larger than 2.5" might add that to the hardware mods post

Would it not be a bit more efficent to use Flash based memory for storage than the mechanical Hard drive itself? As in, the iPod Nano? 2,4 & 8GB of flash seem a bit better on power consumption than the Mechanical based drives. Latency as well. Not to mention size of the overall device can be toned down. Although, Cost per unit may increase. It's not like that would be a problem anyway since Sharp is already charging an ARM and a leg for product with very little hardware features or storage than similar products (Archos) of the hand top market.

Just my opinion.

Yep, you're probably right but I've got a pooped iPod sitting next to me with no purpose in life. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, Imagine 15Gb on a Zaurus.

*dribbles*

The nano's have a very nonstandard conector for the flash module. The nice thing about the microdrives is you can put a swap partition on it and not worry too much about wearing it out. Putting swap on flash isnt a very nice thing to do to the card.

The swap partion is the one reason i wont abandon microdrives, at leat until they put some decent memorey on PDA's (looks like 128MB is starting to become standard)

you could however make a CF card out of RAM but it wouldnt have any where near the speed of native ram, hmm perhaps this is somthing i should add to the hacks page, how to use your old SDRAM sticks with your c3000?

ether way the next big thing for flash seems to be putting FLASH SDRAM and SRAM in the same package but phisycally stacked on top of each other, you can get an xscale chip like that with 32MB of RAM and FLASH on chip

since there are pcmcia sram modules, e.g. from pretec:
http://www.pretec.com/product/SSD/Industrial/sram.htm

then surely there must be a CF equivalent - unfortunately, they're not exactly high capacity - only a few megabytes!


there are also linear flash devices in pcmcia format:
http://www.psism.com/linearflash.htm
i.e. there are not block devices like CF cards and thus could augment the Z's internal flash. again, they're not cheap!

The SRAM is limited to 16MB a sec and would kill your mem bandwidth as they are on the same bus

one thing i find funny is that the nano uses the same chips as the C*K series and they are pin compatible (the chip packages that is) but you are right for somthing that seeks alot and does lots of random read and writes the flash beats the hard drive hands down however for streaming the hard drive beets it quite easily (im refering to a 3.5" Hard drive here not a microdrive which gets its arse kicked in both catagories)

i did come across an article on intels website on how to wire up an ATA disk directly to the xscale throgh the CF connector but it would be alot easier to use a USB to ATA converter or simmilar

I tried this with a 40gb ipod gen 4 drive...

http://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?act=fi...&pid=164945

didn't work... my z now has a bit a of gap on the side... but it was the only way to be sure... in the name of science!