Some years ago I had a run around with some Seagate Udrives. A man on Amazon had a large quantity of them and was selling them off because he couldn't get them to work. They were Seagate ST1.2 8Gb drives. Someone at Seagate
(he said
) had told him that the "do not seal this hole" in the back of the drive was probably for a special connector, and they would not work ordinarily.
Odd folks must work for Seagate.
The hole is an air pressure vent for when the drive is spinning.
People like that wag at Seagate would then go on to tell him that if he could fit into the hole, he'd be in another dimension.
Rather than get all cerebral about it, which is probably beyond me now anyway, I looked about for card readers which actually declared that they would read microdrives. You understand, that these microdrives were unknown to me outside of our Ameos prior to this anyway. And in them, only in the abstract, as I had never had the occasion or probably the courage to dismantle one. The Ameo ones are 8Gb, while a later model that I got... which is not as well appointed I might add... has a 16Gb. Our second ameo's udrive died quite early, and you may imagine that the corpse is still inside it, but the original one runs well to this day.
So then after a lot of digging, I eventually found a card reader which would admit to reading microdrives, and which are still labelled SSK All In One Reader.
It is offered on eBay uk today here
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SSK-CF-MS-SD-MMC-XD-SM-ALL-IN-ONE-Card-Reader-1-year-warranty-/251190560154?pt=US_Memory_Card_Readers_Adapters&hash=item3a7c1fc59a
Although the last one that I got came all the way from Israel.
And when it arrived it did indeed format, read, and write, to these 8Gb Seagate Udrives.
So I emailed the man on amazon and said I could help him out if he'd send me a couple of the drives as a fee.
He did just that, and then sold off the remaining stock at what he needed to show a margin, with the now-confident assertion that they could be used outside of a high-end camera.
And then not long afterwards, I chanced on a chap on eBay wanting to flog some 4Gb IBM branded ones, complete with CF PCMCIA adaptors, as I think IBM then did once sell them. I managed to get four or five of those too. Fastforward to a week or two back and I take delivery of a Psion 7. The mileage on this is so low that I am inclined to believe the chap who sold it to me when he said in his ad that it had been bought new, unpacked, and then put in a draw.
But what a fascinating design concept for an operating system!!
There is a LHS screen button, like our hotkey buttons in the rhs of the J720 screen, which is the key. You can run it as you might in Windoze, as an object oriented system... ie. use the document you want to work on to open the app that is used with it. Or you can just use the hotkey relevant to this. No matter what app you use though, be it WP SS or DB, that top left hotkey's menu items change to reflect the program in use.
This is in fact my second encounter with Psion in this life, the former encounter being with the first Organiser, which is itself pretty good at a lot of things despite the obvious drawback of the screen. But during that first encounter I saw OPL in action. And it is still there in this the final Psion. Yes, I know there were Netbooks afterwards which used the same chassis, but they are not
(in my estimation
) as useful as a MobilePro, having tried one briefly. It was my impression at the time, that someone had taken a MobilePro and stuffed it into the Psion Chassis.
Ah digression, the direct result of an old head on old shoulders, still burdened with the enquiring mind of it's lost youth.
So... back to microdrives... it was touted that these microdrives would indeed serve in the MobilePro-like left hand slot on the Psion 7. Perhaps it was thought the more so since the Psion has a thoughtfully designed drawer for this. When you want to get the CF out, you open the drawer, then poke your finger into the hole on the underside of the drawer and so elevate the card to make removing it easier.
And so it might be, but not with 8Gb drives anyway. The Psion does not even bother to tell you that it won't read them, it dismisses them with a flicker of the screen. Best I can do for this slot is a FAT Formatted 2Gb CF.
So, for my two-penneth, buy a couple of PCMCIA CF adapters and install the extended CF drivers on your Jornada 72x.
Keep a few for you, and then send some to your friends.
QF 03-05-2013
Edited by quinbus_flestrin 2013-05-03 11:32 AM
I opened the box to be sure that I didn't bid on 20 brand new rocks. Anyways since they are all new what would you say they are worth? 
