OESF Portables Forum
General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: nexxusone on October 25, 2004, 03:33:36 pm
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I'm going to be buying a Zaurus clamshell in the near future, though I personally have never owned one before. Here are my observations, as an outsider. Please dispute them (you'll prevent me from making an expensive mistake) or confirm them. Thanks!
It seems to me that by adding a 2gb SD card to a Zaurus c860, I'd be getting a better (though slightly more expensive) machine than the C3000.
The C3000 has only 64mb of SDRAM, while the c860 has 128.
The C3000 has a mechanical harddrive. The battery life WILL be inferior to the c860.
The C3000 looks to be significantly heavier and larger than the c860
Would it be possible to configure the SD card to mount as /? If not, couldnt you move most of the system folders to the SD card later and replace them with symlinks? Would this be undesirable for any reason?
Since the SD cards rotate which areas they write to, and you get 100k writes for the life of a SD card, if I were able to keep only 100mb free, it would take 100,000,000 MB (1TB) of data being written to start destroying sectors on the card, right? If so, this 'limit' isn't really a concern.
People say that the I/O performance of the Z's SD port isn't very speedy, but if most of the 128MB of sdram were available for use as RAM (and not as a ramdisk), wouldnt you be able to leave most of your programs open all of the time (thus alleviating the slow load time for something like Firefox)?
I've read of a few problems people had with SD cards becoming read-only when waking the Zaurus from sleep. How often does this sort of thing happen?
Thanks!
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The 860 and 3000 both use 64MB for memory. The 128MB on the 860 is used for user storage. The 3000 will use 4GB for user storage.
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The 128MB on the 860 should also be quicker than the 4GB HDD of the 3000, but obviously able to store alot more. The supposed power saving of the newer CPU might offset some of the HDD higher power requirements.
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Actually the 860's 128Mb of Flash is usually split into a read only root partition and a user partition. Traditional Sharp ROM is about 50-50 split.
Currently Cacko 1.21b gives you 96Mb of actual user storage on the 860 whilst something like PDAXROM gives you the whole thing but I think you will find the runtime libraries larger so you end up with slightly less user space than something like Cacko. But the choice here is what you want it for not the amount of space that PDAXROM gives you.
FYI: The SL-C3000 has only 16Mb of flash space, reliying on the HDD instead of the user flash partition.
Both units have 64Mb SDRAM so at present the question is do you want a 4Gb HDD all the time.??
If large SD cards are good for you then possibly the 860 is a good choice.
- Andy
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I would look at it this way, can I add 4GB of storage to an 860 for less than the price of the 3000? If not, then I'd go with the 3000. Also, if you are one that needs or could benefit from having access to large amounts of storage while a wifi card is installed, I'd go with the 3000.
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except the insides and all that....
Maybe it depends if you like pearl white (barbie...) with shiny silver thing or normal silver altogether???
lol
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Since the SD cards rotate which areas they write to, and you get 100k writes for the life of a SD card, if I were able to keep only 100mb free, it would take 100,000,000 MB (1TB) of data being written to start destroying sectors on the card, right? If so, this 'limit' isn't really a concern.
Not entirely true. You can't write a single byte to an SD card. The writes are done on a sector by sector basis. Using your example of 100MB free and assuming 512 byte sectors (typical), that works out to about 2,000,000,000 write operations.
How that translates into number of bytes written depends on how spread out the writes are. If you were to write the same location (let's say an access time in a directory sector) over and over, you could be looking at as little as 2GB of actual data written. If the writes are to sequential locations (like you get when saving a big file) that number goes up to around 1000GB of actual data written.
Reality lies somewhere between the two numbers. Exactly where depends on how you use the storage. Mounting -sync or without -noatime or using a swap file will push you towards the low end numbers. Using it as a simple filesystem for saving large files will push it towards the high end numbers.
In either case, your assertion that the "limit" isn't a big concern is true. And if you want to be really safe, buy an SD card with a lifetime warranty and routinely back up your data and you'll have no worries.
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The 128MB on the 860 should also be quicker than the 4GB HDD of the 3000, but obviously able to store alot more. The supposed power saving of the newer CPU might offset some of the HDD higher power requirements.
I'm not sure if this is exactly true. The flash memory used in the Zaurus is quite slow. I think you'll find that both constant read and write speeds are better with the 4GB HD. The only time where the flash memory might be quicker is where you are writing lots of little files with large periods of inactivity in between because of spin up delays with the HD if it has spun down.
Flash memory also requires a lot more juice to write to than RAM. That combined with the fact that the JFFS2 filesystem used on flash memory uses compression (read: uses more CPU power) may mean the power consumption of the HD may be about the same.
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I would look at it this way, can I add 4GB of storage to an 860 for less than the price of the 3000? If not, then I'd go with the 3000. Also, if you are one that needs or could benefit from having access to large amounts of storage while a wifi card is installed, I'd go with the 3000.
er, weren't people adding 4GB for < $200 ?
:->
Scott
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I'm not sure if this is exactly true. The flash memory used in the Zaurus is quite slow. I think you'll find that both constant read and write speeds are better with the 4GB HD. The only time where the flash memory might be quicker is where you are writing lots of little files with large periods of inactivity in between because of spin up delays with the HD if it has spun down.
Flash memory also requires a lot more juice to write to than RAM. That combined with the fact that the JFFS2 filesystem used on flash memory uses compression (read: uses more CPU power) may mean the power consumption of the HD may be about the same.
Thanks Tumnus,
That's good information to know.
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I would look at it this way, can I add 4GB of storage to an 860 for less than the price of the 3000? If not, then I'd go with the 3000. Also, if you are one that needs or could benefit from having access to large amounts of storage while a wifi card is installed, I'd go with the 3000.
er, weren't people adding 4GB for < $200 ?
:->
Scott
Yes, I was one of them who bought a 4GB Creative Muvo2 MP3 for $200 + tax. However, if I were trying to decide what to buy now, I would buy an SL-3000 based on the current prices displayed on the Conics website:
3000 $749
860 $649
Even if you could get a 4GB CF for $100, the 3000 would be better because it is internal and the upgraded processor. When or if the price of the 860 drops significantly, then the 860 would be a better deal, in my opinion.
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What I'm still pondering is whether Sharp will produce a HD-less 3000 which can still fit into a pocket, with the form factor of a 860, with more flash ram.
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Personally, I look at the internal HD as a major minus.
While it does save the CF slot....a second CF slot would have made it cheaper and user replaceable when the hard drive fails.
The enitre Z is pretty much solid state (not an engineer, so I use that term loosely), and also an INTERNAL HD not puts a very finite lifetime on the unit. If my 4GB drive fails: I yank it, get another , restore and I am back in business. If I owned a 3000....well let's just remember this thing is warranteed from japan...'nough said.
Non-user servicable moving parts are always a bad idea for the life expentency of electronics.
I imagine we all own PCs.....How many Hard drives have you replaced due to crashes/failures.? .....Now how many motherboards? (besides for obsolesence reasons).
The thing is the MD has a specific G-forcce rating that while writing is not all that tremendous. Much better than a notebook drive, but worse than flash (I would imagine).
Now two CF and two SD (both with SDIO) would have been a great improvement....and at a lower cost.
Sharp has never listened to thier (non japanese) users...I don't recall a siingle post about the need for a built in hard drive....now I heard of built in GPS, WIFI, BT, GPRS, USB HOST, etc... but never hard drive.
What gets me is that it took them a YEAR to make the SL-3000??? What did they do after the first day wiring the MD in......I guess that is when they decided a new processor was in order giving us another 25 Mhz....WooHoo
Need more room, pull some flash out. Then I guess they spent 9 months on the new keyboard (which admitedly looks nice).
I must admit it ain't bad for the price diff from the C860. But I could not see a single 860 owner REALLY needing this (beyond the latest gadget fever thing we all probably share ).
my 2 cents.
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Sharp has never listened to thier (non japanese) users...I don't recall a siingle post about the need for a built in hard drive....now I heard of built in GPS, WIFI, BT, GPRS, USB HOST, etc... but never hard drive.
The 25mhz difference is not the only thing. The new proc has higher IPC, and added functionality (unused on the 3000 )
I agree that a second CF slot (even if it came with a 4GB mdrive) would have been much better. SDIO that works and is supported would be nice too.
The lacking aspects of the Z are in communications: most mobile network cards are hard to use, and telephony is not possible yet.
If I was buying a new one, I'd definitely get the 3000, but you won't find many people upgrading, I think.
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I went against most of your recommendations, and bought the C860 anyway =)
I was able to get a pretty good deal from http://www.lolzer.com/ (http://www.lolzer.com/) and he's selling them even cheaper now ($538.27 shipped). Part of the deal is that if you ever need warranty work done, he will facilitate the process (this is the big downside to buying from pricejapan as I understood it).
Anyway, I've installed almost every app I want, and there's still plenty of memory free. So I'm going to go start a new thread about IMAP mail clients. If I could cache my IMAP folders to my zaurus, that'd be the perfect excuse to buy a 2gb SD card ;-)
Thanks again for all of your help everyone!
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Personally, I look at the internal HD as a major minus.
While it does save the CF slot....a second CF slot would have made it cheaper and user replaceable when the hard drive fails.
The enitre Z is pretty much solid state (not an engineer, so I use that term loosely), and also an INTERNAL HD not puts a very finite lifetime on the unit. If my 4GB drive fails: I yank it, get another , restore and I am back in business. If I owned a 3000....well let's just remember this thing is warranteed from japan...'nough said. .
We don't know what the inside of the thing looks like yet. The unit has a large cover on the bottom, similar to the BL08 battery cover. What I would do if I were Sharp, given their off the shelf parts mentailty, is use the ability of the Processor to host 2 CF slots and put a second CF slot under that cover with with a standard CF Type II Hitachi HD. It may yet be reasonably easy to swap that drive, and it may even be possible to swap in a large capacity solid state card. (Which is what I'd be tempted to do, especially if that HD was usable in the regular CF slot on the side of the unit, for when I wanted that much storage. - MP3 or Video, which typically doesn't get done at the same time as surfing anyway)
Sharp has never listened to thier (non japanese) users...I don't recall a siingle post about the need for a built in hard drive....now I heard of built in GPS, WIFI, BT, GPRS, USB HOST, etc... but never hard drive.
Not to defend Sharp's deplorable marketing strategies any more than I absolutely have to, but why should they listen to us? We aren't Japanese, and we aren't even supposed to be able to buy the bloody thing.
As for built in connectivity, I just came back from 2 weeks in Japan, 3 days of which were spent in Akihabara, and one and a half in Osaka's Den Den Town (No. 2 in electronics districts). You know what? You'd be hard pressed to buy a CF format 802.11b card there. I saw maybe 3 stores with them, one of which carried used units, and another was in Akihabara's flea market stall area. They have PCMCIA 802.11b galore, but nothing for CF. The main reason is that anyone that uses a handheld uses one of the many flavors of cellular wireless available over there, because it is cheap, fast enough, and usable anywhere in the bloody country, not just within 50ft of a hotspot. Literally every second store carried the AirH cards. This is why I don't think we'll see anything useful, connectivity wise, in the Z any time soon.
Incidently, this is also why the built in HD makes sense. Lots of storage for your music/video, etc, and you stick your connectivity card of choice in when you want to connect.
What gets me is that it took them a YEAR to make the SL-3000??? What did they do after the first day wiring the MD in......I guess that is when they decided a new processor was in order giving us another 25 Mhz....WooHoo
Need more room, pull some flash out. Then I guess they spent 9 months on the new keyboard (which admitedly looks nice).
They don't have to do much. They've already got a big chunk of the market there, and there isn't anything that comes close to the Z for functionality at that size. They've got basically the same choice in PDAs as we have here - Keyboardless Windows CE devices and Palms, Sony's bizarre form factor keyboard stuff (The NX70/NX80 Star Trek communicators, or their clamshell with the crummy keyboard and half vga screen, can't remember what it is called), and the Z. They do have some *extremely* tiny laptops, but they cost at 3x what the Z does, and are massive in comparison to the Z.
The fact that they've added the dictionaries and translators to the Z is a killer feature for the Japanese market. Just about every shop over there sells a selection of 20 or 30 different clamshell dictionaries around the same size as the Z or a little bigger for about 20000 yen and up. (My sister has one, a Canon Wordtank, as she was teaching English over there for a couple of years.) Useful little gadgets for Kanji lookup, etc, and there is apparently a huge market for them. Putting it in the Z is a stroke of genius, as it saves people carrying 2 devices, plus the not inconsiderate cost of buying one on top of a PDA. I don't think you could do that with most PDA's over there because of the lack of keyboard on them.
I bought my 860 for a really good price, and I find that it is worth every penny, no questions asked. It replaces my Palm, my MP3 player, my laptop for 99% of things that I would lug it around for, various combo's of things I would haul around for studying Japanese, and is one of the best e-book readers around. Not to mention that it makes a damn good emergency flashlight.
I had problems with the 3000 specs when they were announced, but now there's no doubt in my mind that I'll get one within the next 6 months, because I think that having that much permanent storage on top of the flexibilty of free compact flash and SD slots is a very good thing.
(So is USB host, but I really don't understand them not using a 3.7" version of the 6000's transflexive screen. Ah well - the Z will always have flaws, but there is still nothing else like them.)
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Dood,
you've basically summed up my reasons for buying the SL-C3000!
I think I will be looking for a WIFI CF card though as I'm not willing to cough up another 2000 or so yen per month paying for on-the-go internet (I already have yahooBB).
off-topic - went to an electrical store today to try out the 860, we couldn't figure it out how to turn the thing on. Same with the 750. The charging light was on, but no matter what the storepeople did, they couldn't turn it on!! What's up with that???
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You all have probably seen the posts already, but the 4gb "internal drive" in the 3000 is a Hitachi microdrive!.
As earlier in this post mentioned, Sharp has shoved another CF slot inside the Z and Wham. bam. internal 4gb storage!
The main point being that if you (God forbid) drop your 3000, I think you can still salvage your storage space with a bit of engineering operation/transplant.
I have an 860 and just tonight purchased a 4gb "Buffalo" microdrive (Available in Japan. Comes with an interesting Hitachi label wrapped around it)
Still trying to figure out what best to use this new found space for. Hoping to find a good version of Wikipedia. (so far zbedic is the best option... any opinions?. I know this is talked about all over the place in different posts.)
If I had waited for the 3000 to arrive, I would have purchased one, but
I am not particularly dissapointed in owning the 860.
Either model is a great way to spend your hard earned bucks.
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Forgive my ignorance, but I'm confused about the SL-C3000's memory specs. It has 16 MB SDRAM and 64 MB of normal RAM. Which of these is used for memory (RAM) and which is simply a user storage location?
Does anyone have some good links to pictures of the SL-C3000?
I found a set of pictures here... (http://www.glenn.techstacy.org/3000.html)
I was surprised when I saw it! I didn't realize previously that the SL-C3000 was a clamshell (boy do I feel stupid!). So, is this the official SL-C860 replacement? Has someone already posted an SL-C860 / SL-C3000 comparison?
..wow...
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64mb is memory, 16mb is for rom and 4gb is for user space, but a good chunk of that is used for a japanese multimedia dictionary. I don't own one so I may be a little off.
Try conics.net for pics