After a long time admiring the zaurus (I have an iPAQ 3970 and I experimented with Familiar Linux a lot) I decided to buy a 3100 or a 3200 and start again to experiment :-)
I'd like to replace the internal MD with a CF, but I have a doubt.
Does it make sense to buy a Sandisk Extreme IV, with a 40MB/s throughput, or the Zaurus CF bus is a bottleneck for this CF? Would it make more sense to buy a cheaper Extreme III (20Mb/s) or the Zaurus can take advantage of the Extreme IV?
Many thanks in advance.

This thread
might be an intresting read for you.

Yes, I know that iPod drives don't work.
But I'm talking of a standard CF with flash memory and I read somewhere that other people successfully replaced the MD with CF; I'm concerned only about CF speed.

the CF bus isn't that fast, I'm told, so the main gain would be power consumption, and lack of seek time on the disk.

others have carried out the radical surgery and said it's ok, others have had early failure of the card.

The reports I've seen range from improved performance (read/write, as well as battery life), and early death as mentioned above. If you're going to do it, I would suggest getting a good name brand (good is really a matter of opinion and past experience with flash memory, personally I have never had problems with SanDisk), and not storing anything critical.

The microdrives are nice and reliable, but the spin up and seek times are always painfully apparent when loading larger applications. If I was looking to do this upgrade, depending on the cost difference, I would get the fastest possible. Worst come to worst, the Z doesn't operate at the memory's full capability, and you use it for something else later on.

Make sure to report back on your progress.