PCMCIA Hard disk drive???

Hello my friends.

I am thinking about buying a PCMCIA hard driave by Kingston at 5 GBs.

At 162 euros, it seems a good deal, however I have a few questions to those of you guys who have previous experience with such a device...

How much is the battery duration affected by its use? In addition, what is the average (not in theory) data transfer rate?

Thanx for any response.

The answers to your questions depend a lot on what device you are using. Also, it would be good if you could state what is your intended use of the drive, eg storage only, running apps, file transfers, etc.

I have a jornada 720 and two 1500 mah batteries. I intend to use it for mainly for storage, especialy pictures, pdfs, some MP3 and perhaps some video clips. Definately not for running apps. These are permenately on my CF.

OK, here's the story....

The Toshiba PC Card Hard Drives will spin down if not accessed after a short period to save power - they are SMART in this sense. If you are accessing the drive a lot then you will see your batteries run down faster but we are not talking major power drain.

From my experience with a Toshiba 5GB drive on both a Jornada 720 and Intermec 6651 the drive does have a *significant* but not destructive impact on battery life. Used infrequently, i don't think you'll notice that much.

You should probably remove the drive from the Jornada when not in use though just to prevent unecessary spinning up of the drive.

These comments are for the Toshiba PC Card Drives but as far as I'm aware the Kingston ones are pretty much the same hardware.

Opening files on the drives is not much different from opening files from CF or internal memory except that if the drive is 'asleep' it will take a couple of seconds to power up.

Just one more thing to add on using the drive for transferring data (eg, images from a digital camera on CF to the drive)

Windows CE 2.11 is very slow

HPC 2000 is very fast

Don't ask me why but we are talking minutes (HPC2000) compared to hours (CE 2.11) for large file transfers

you get the point.



Strange indeed. Thankfully then that my device has HPC 2000...

Can I plz ask something more specific? My 720's battery lasts roughly 7 hours on MP3 playback with its diplay turned off. What is the figure I should expect with the PCMCIA HDD?

BTW, the Toshiba HDD is more expensive by 30 euros...

If the MP3's are all being played from the PC Card drive I would *estimate* you'd probably get 4-5 hours use as opposed to your usual 7 without the drive. However, since I never use my drive to play MP3's from, I couldn't say for sure.

Unless somebody else on these forums uses the drive for the same purpose with the exact same hardware it would be hard for anybody to estimate exactly how long the battery would last with the drive in use. Mine is only used for infrequent accessing of files and does not impact battery life to any large degree.

I know that when I transfer large amount of images from CF to PC Card drive the card is constantly spinning (obviously ) and does then start to have an effect on battery life.

Hey, I could do a little experiment with mine and play MP3's all day and night but since my Telios' battery lasts a fair amount of time I wouldn't have results before Sunday!