imported_airhead

Soon to buy a microdrive to replace my 125M CF card, way too small. You guys suggest a reliable brand? Hitachi 4G drives take my fancy, as price (Ebay) of around AU$250 seems ok and much better than similar flash sizes. How does their speed/power usage compare to flash, ....real world please, specs. quoted on manufacturers sites are tongue in cheek sometimes? Do they have any pros/cons compared to flash?
Thanks in advance...............Bill...........;-)

rob1303

airhead - you may want to do a search on the microdrive v CF card question as there are lots of threads/ discussions about it.

But basically:

Solid state cards are more reliable/ use less power - as they have no moving parts.

Speed is not an issue as that is governed by the writing/ reading capabilities of your iPaq (but as they are solid state CF cards are usually faster - especially in a card reader).

I find that my Microdrive uses between 10-18% additional power to a solid state card ie) if using a solid state card to listen to music took 20% of my battery then the microdrive would take (about) 23% - if find this an acceptable trade-off.

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Regards

Rob

imported_airhead

Woops! Thanks for your patience Rob. As I'm new to the site, I neglected to look further afield to other forums. Found a whole stack on the storage card forum threads.
Thanks for your summary anyway, now just have to make a decision.
Bill.....;-)

rob1303

Not a problem on not searching - I only start getting sarcastic after someone has been a member a while

The only reason I mentioned searching was you would be likely to find ALL the answers you were after (and more) which it is difficult to do in one post.

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Rob

GeekyGuy

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whymewhynot

I have the 4 gig Hitachi since about Feb and so far so good, no complaints. Iwas a bit worried about its shock resistance but after a "Slo Mo slam dunk" drop to a concrete assisted stop in the garage for the 4700 with drive installed ( and the pda not in its case as I had just removed it from the Seido Car mount ) it was fine (though fortunately it was not actually reading at the time or it might be a different story ).

The hx4700 survived no sweat although the instant stopping was accompanied by a horrendious dinking noise !! It even bounced ! Try that with a plastic fantastic.

Bill

emtownsend

I too have the 4GB Hitachi drive and I love it. I use it for my iPaq and my Canon 20D camera. I can swap it back and forth and both devices use the space as needed. It is just a bit hard to remove from the HX4700 since the usual lip on a CF card is covered with a thick Hitachi label.
It can be had on Zipzoomfly.com (as of today) for $160.50 shipped. The 6GB version is $246 shipped!

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Sprint PPC6700

robert_a_hudson

Originally Posted by emtownsend

I too have the 4GB Hitachi drive and I love it. I use it for my iPaq and my Canon 20D camera. I can swap it back and forth and both devices use the space as needed. It is just a bit hard to remove from the HX4700 since the usual lip on a CF card is covered with a thick Hitachi label. It can be had on Zipzoomfly.com (as of today) for $160.50 shipped. The 6GB version is $246 shipped!

having a look, and zipzoomfly.com doesnt seem to work....

Also, has anyone got (and have sucess with the 4700) with the Seagate SG 8GB Microdrive?

mario24601

Does anyone have the Seagate 8GB working on the hx4700?

rogue9

Originally Posted by mario24601

Does anyone have the Seagate 8GB working on the hx4700?

I've been using the Seagate 8GB CF Microdrive in a 2755 for almost a month now and it works flawlessly. I know it isn't your device but I would guess that if the lower end model can handle it the 4700 should as well. I also made a post in the storage cards section of the Hardware Forum. There a phenominal deal right now @ amazon for the CF card for about $150USD after MIR.

Good Luck

buckyg

Hey thanks for the heads-up on the sweet deal on Amazon. Been debating about getting that CF from them before, it's an even better deal now. Hopefully, it will work on the 4700, can't imagine why it wouldn't.

mario24601

How fast is the Seagate drive when using it in your ipaq and when moving files to from your pc to the seagate?
Have you noticed a drain in battery? When you are not accessing files on the drive is it still "on" draining battery? Is it hard to remove it from your ipaq?

Big G

Originally Posted by mario24601

How fast is the Seagate drive when using it in your ipaq and when moving files to from your pc to the seagate? Have you noticed a drain in battery? When you are not accessing files on the drive is it still "on" draining battery? Is it hard to remove it from your ipaq?

It is pretty fast. I moved about 5gb of mp3's off of my laptop and it was quick (at least for 5gb's worth of data). I've watched full movies off of it with no battery problems. I've listened to music for about 2 hours one time with the backlight off and the battery was around only 1/4 used. It is very quiet and runs cooler than my old microdrive.

I have not noticed any drain on the battery when not in use but it does spin up everytime you access any files that are located anywhere on your PPC. It is difficult to remove but if you use the tape trick it is not bad. I read here just the other day that someone was using a fuse puller with no problems.

Buy it quick from Amazon. The rebate is good only if you buy it from Amazon between the 18th and the 23rd.

mario24601

Thanks for the input...it does sound great but still cant decide to go with the 8gb seagate or a 4gb sd card, the sd card will be about $50 more...I just dont know which to get.

I mostly use my hx4705 to view jpgs and mpegs, I have a 33x SD 1gb card now I like but need more space, I want to be able to "jump" from jpeg to jpeg or movie to movie and not have a huge lag...I wonder how the seagate would perform?

buckyg

Just got mine!!! Seems to work okay in my 4705. Reports 7.43GB free, straight out of the box.

Can't really give a good gauge of performance yet. I didn't think to bring my USB card reader to work. Trying to copy from my old drive to the new using the PC card on my laptop seems like it will take too long. So I'll have to play with it this weekend.

Hmm... might be able to copy some JPGs and short videos from the SD to the drive, see how it does. Will let you know.