j6cubic said:
Poem58 said:
Toshiba announced .85" microdrives in 2004.
It appears this has been abandoned, too bad, by now there could have been some decent storage amounts (an article mentioned 8GB somewhere and was also mentioned to be SD compatible but neither mentioned in linked article.)
I assume flash was just too much more cost effective and as we know more durable, I cannot find evidence they ever manufactured them.
http://www.palminfoc...ch-hard-drives/
Maybe they will be available in around 2 months?
You can always go with CompactFlash – or rather Microdrives, which are CF-sized HDDs. Microdrives are what's inside all those small HDD-driven MP3 players. I have no idea if there's a decent USB case for Microdrives but at 1" it would make for relatively tiny storage. I think they make Microdrives with sizes up to 16 GiB; I'm sure that there are 8 GiB versions around.
Addendum: Yes, there are 1" external HDDs. The LaCie "little disk" (yes, that's the product name) comes in 30G and 40G flavors for 40-65 Euros. At least that's what eBay Germany says. Note, however, that apparently LaCie uses that name for bigger hard drives, as well.
Yeah, I know about microdrives (last i knew they topped out at 12GB, but haven't looked in awhile) I have no use for a microdrive (had one once, it was slow and killed my battery life so I sold it while it had value, think I paid about $150 for a 320GB version now I have a 1GB CF card which costs what, maybe $20?)) and using compact flash would not be easier on the Pandora seeing as how it doesn't have a compact flash slot so it would require rather bulky excess, while if the .85" drive would have been produced it was supposedly supposed to essentially be an SD Microdrive, which we could have used, and if the one inch drive you mentioned has gotten to 40G, it's not entirely inconceivable that the .85" drive could have made it to 20 or 30 gigs by now had it been produced. Still though compared to SD cards it would be more expensive per gig and have a faster failure rate.
I would just buy a cheaper, faster, more reliable SDHC card at 16 gigs before having a 16Gig microdrive protruding from my Pandora. I only mentioned this as it could have provided another option. Afer all why not just write drivers and connect a Dataplay device? It's just not worth the effort. Which is why I assume they canceled the .85" drive.
I anxiously await the day I can upgrade the system and insert my 2TB SDXC card's, install my new Betavoltaic battery and fire up some retro game through the Archaicsignal to Fiber optic converter and show my grandson some glorious Atari 2600 on the OLED painted wall/Display. That is if I can get him to turn off the HD-Interactatron Implant long enough to see what whacky old grandpa is doing with his crazy gizmo you have to touch. I expect that most of these problems will be corrected by then. As the Pandora 5 will have a 16 core ARM Cerebrum A-25 8.3 Ghz SOC with an SGX 999 @3.3Ghz 256GB ram and use holographic 10TB storage cubes (2 slots). It will run continuously for 25 years on the before mentioned Betavoltaic battery. There will be no display or even buttons as the wireless Fiber-optic (Wi-Fibe) system will stream all necessary images and controls directly into the supplied implant chip (implantation not included).
But I like to do things the older, simpler way. So I plan to still be using my original Pandora. These guys better keep alot of parts on hand. I'm sure I'm not the only one. If and when I buy the Pandora 2 someday, I will have to make a glass case to store my original Pandora as-is so I can revisit it 15 years later. If I have to I will wire up potatoes and lemons for power, but it will boot again! (Who am I kidding, I'll be lucky if my 5 year old doesn't beg me for it so much that i won't even have it to play on in less than 2 months, just to get peace! At present he uses my PDA ,DS ,Laptop ,Desktop and would have my PSP if I hadn't sold it! He's had the DS since he was 2!)
When I was five we had 8 track tapes, rotary phones, bulky pocket radios, Jimmy Carter, Scooby-Doo etc. If there was no one to play with you had to play with yourself (figuratively or if you were strange literally) So as I grew up dreaming of things (came up with minidisc like idea about 1985 or so) I got to see technology advance fast enough to make these dreams reality, in a day and age where there's not much left to surprise us with, despite the fact that compared to other things invented in my lifetime, the Pandora may not be revolutionary or groundbreaking, the Pandora may be the last of the ultimate wish idea's to really come true.
/whatever that was, back to topic.
