im getting a cl3200 to replace my tired jornada 720, but i have reservations about microdrives.

i did a search and found some info on replacing the micro drive with a larger micro drive but nothing on a cf replacement. i have several questions:

is their any reason i should shy away from replacing the 6gig mcd with an 8gig cf and running cacko?

is the lowered power consumption and faster load times of a cf card really worth the time/expense/risk?

do i really need to worry about micro drive failure?

if anyone could answer these questions and provide some detailed information on exactly how to install a new cf card that would be wonderful.

i use mandriva linux so doing linux partitions are within my abilities.

The force required to kill a microdrive will render the Zaurus to dust. Microdrives also don't lose data size over time like cf cards will.

thanks for the fast reply.

that is very good to know. i hear horror stories about laptop hds failing and such, but i guess with the smaller moving mass the micro drive is more robust.

All drives eventually fail. The microdrive is no different. Since we (cacko users) aren't actually running the os off the drive, they will last longer.

You should be worried about your NAND instead. If that wears out, then its time to learn how to solder new chips onto the tiny Z pcb On the other hand, if the MicroDrive fails, you just replace it with another MicroDrive or a CF card.

Been there done that, and killed one of my old iPaqs.

Swapping on flash cards is no good in my book. I like having swap available at all times, so the microdrive really helps.

I recently saw that you can get a 16GB CF card for $105 after (a very large) mail-in rebate, and I was wondering how well that would work as a replacement for the Zaurus' internal microdrive. Any thoughts? Having such a large amount of internal storage is very attractive to me. With a 4GB SD card, you'd have 20GB available and still have the CF slot free. If you really wanted to, you could stuff about 36GB in the Zaurus if you used one of these 16GB cards in the CF slot as well!

http://www.adorama.com/IDSCF16GE3.html?sid=1178986716357250

How hard is it to replace the internal microdrive, anyway?

to my understanding the repetitive writing of the swap file would tax the life span of the cf card. Compact Flash like the majority of flash (for the exception of Nand and ram) have limited write cycles, hard drives do not. i understand the desire for more storage on board the zaurus however it is impossible to guarantee the life span of such a modification.

I think it depends on whether you're going to mainly store data on the drive which isn't being rewritten all the time... if you run cacko for example, you should be fairly safe unless you put swap on the CF.

if you really MUST put swap on the CF, partition it up such that you create the swap part'n right at the end of the CF card, so that if you do wear it out (you'd only create say 256MB swap anyway, any more is pointless) and get bad blocks, simply repartition and stop using that area of the card!

in fact, even if you did use OZ, provided that you ensured that the CF was formated jffs(2) which spreads wear, mounted it noatime/async and didn't have loads of file rewriting, you'd probably get away with it?

I've thought about this a lot, but would still prefer to try and get a hitachi 20GB microdrive which exist but aren't generally on sale.

Couldn't you just put the swap file on an SD card? They're both flash of course, but it would be cheaper and easier to replace. In any case, I've actually be using a swap file on my SD card for quite a while with no apparent ill effects.

well speed for one thing would be a factor

as for putting it at the end eof the dirve i wouldnt really now how effecitve that would be as they dont releases the wear leveling infomation but if its a "every x blocks has y spare" then it mould be fine, but if its a pool of spare blocks then you would be SOL

ah, yes, that's true... what would happen in that case is that you'd run out of spare blocks and then start to see creeping failure whenever you changed an existing file or created a new one.