Sl-6000l Vs. Sl-c1000 Vs. Sl-c3200

[RobbH]

From what it sounds like, you'll probably replace the 3200 before the drive dies anyway!  I thought magnetic media wears out slower than flash anyway.  Flash only has so many writes, at least that's what I thought.  It may have changed.
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No, I think it's all still true. Flash memory (both cards and the internal NAND, will wear out after a certain number of write cycles. I accept that and it's not what I'm concerned with.

My concern is sudden failure as a result of relatively minor mechanical shock. Like, say, a drop of six inches or so. I don't think there is any question that microdrives have been vulnerable to this sort of failure in the past. The risk is probably much less with newer microdrives; really not worth worrying about. I'll get over it when I need to.

[Meanie]

From what it sounds like, you'll probably replace the 3200 before the drive dies anyway!  I thought magnetic media wears out slower than flash anyway.  Flash only has so many writes, at least that's what I thought.  It may have changed.
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No, I think it's all still true. Flash memory (both cards and the internal NAND, will wear out after a certain number of write cycles. I accept that and it's not what I'm concerned with.

My concern is sudden failure as a result of relatively minor mechanical shock. Like, say, a drop of six inches or so. I don't think there is any question that microdrives have been vulnerable to this sort of failure in the past. The risk is probably much less with newer microdrives; really not worth worrying about. I'll get over it when I need to.
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I've dropped my Z several times and go the scratches to remind me of it ;( but still no problems with the microdrive. I realise, you can throw the cf flash against the wall and it still works. i wouldn't do it with a microdrive though
in general, treat the Z like you would treat a laptop. if certain conditions are ok for a laptop, then the same should hold for the Z. my OQO has a freefall detection feature to park the hdd head automaticaly. it has a 1.8" toshiba hdd inside it. not sure whether microdrives have such a neat feature.
but I wouldn't take my Zaurus for a jog while listening to music on it. not sure whether it was designed for that, but that's what an ipod is for  much lighter anyway for those long jogs...

[nevarrie]

but I wouldn't take my Zaurus for a jog while listening to music on it. not sure whether it was designed for that, but that's what an ipod is for  much lighter anyway for those long jogs...
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There are a few times I miss having my 6k strapped to my arm as I was walking, the biggest problem was I only had weight ristance on one arm.  Now with my nano I can not tell it is there when I am walking.

[BarryW]

From what it sounds like, you'll probably replace the 3200 before the drive dies anyway!  I thought magnetic media wears out slower than flash anyway.  Flash only has so many writes, at least that's what I thought.  It may have changed.
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No, I think it's all still true. Flash memory (both cards and the internal NAND, will wear out after a certain number of write cycles. I accept that and it's not what I'm concerned with.

My concern is sudden failure as a result of relatively minor mechanical shock. Like, say, a drop of six inches or so. I don't think there is any question that microdrives have been vulnerable to this sort of failure in the past. The risk is probably much less with newer microdrives; really not worth worrying about. I'll get over it when I need to.
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With the size of the arm inside a microdrive, any mechanical shock sufficient enough to cause a head crash will render the rest of the Z a pile of dust.  I think I read somewhere they can survive a running shock of 40 to 50 G's.  I'll go look that up real quick.


Well I was off a bit.  Operational shock is  200 G for 2 milliseconds.  Nonoperational is 2000 G for 1 millisecond.

[Da_Blitz]

if i remeber correcttly a 200G drop is 1M onto hard concrete (take those figures with a grain of salt)

i havent had a problem with them and i treat it fairly badly (playing music while walking/runnig droping it) it depends on your usage patterns really

what it dosent like is heavy vibration. when you go to read the head will vibrate and things go awry. walking and such is a better pattern as there are long periods of "stillness" followed by a change in direction (relitive low G as well, i would calculate about 0.5G, i can do the calcs if you want)

With flash how fast it wears out really depends on usage patterns, how many spare sectors are avalible. all chips have non acsesseble spare sectors so that they can "patch" the damadged sectors, the lowwer capacity chip you get the more spare sectors you get. this is mainly because they only use a few flash chip sizes and remap how many spare sectors there are. they might do it slightly difrently but i know thats how they used to do it

another thing that affects the "burn out" time of flash is the quality of the chips. cheap asin semiconductor manufacturers are known to have thier cards burn out faster. i belive this is because they use less of the "remap" sectors than others and hence they run out faster

if you want to do the calculations to estimate the life of a flash chip (that is until there is 1 unrecoverable sector) then the calculations are a bit difficult if you dont know things such as how many writes there are to a given device otherwise take 100000 and divide that by the number of writes to the same sector per day. this should give you an estimated lifetime in days. keep in mind its very rough and varies from manufacturer to manufacturer

for refrence i have dropped my Z from 2M onto hard concrete while active and had no damadge sustained to the HD that normal tools can detect, it still works fine. i have also dropped it onto carpet from a hieght of 1m and it still works, they are tough, not as tough as a CF card (which you can nail to a tree and they still work, cant remeber the link) but quite close