Toshiba 5GB PC Card for $150

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-Details.asp?sku=T24-1102%20P' target='_blank'>http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...ku=T24-1102%20P</a><br /><br /></div>For those of you still using PC cards on your Pocket PCs, check this deal out. <br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/toshiba5gb-20030220.jpg" /><br /><br />I'm tempted to get one of these, bundle it with my PC card sleeve with my old 3650, and use it as a cheap iPod-like device (with Ogg support...). Has anyone found even better pricing?

[kagayaki1]

Damn, you posted on my jewel I've been following for 2 months.

In a nutshell, this is the best price. However, for those of you paranoid about portable HDD, you should consider the warranty periods. The Toshiba drive linked here has a 1 year warranty. However, Kingston Technologies, which rebrands the exact same drive and includes a 3 year warranty, can be found at PC Connection for $199. So, is two extra years of coverage important to you?

-Jason

[tonywms]

:lol: I have been extremely happy with the drive. I purchase mine from tiger direct about 3 months ago. $150.00 plus $20.00 for the 2 year extended warrenty.

[don dre]

My roommate has one of these in the 2 gig version. it skips on him when he's walking sometimes. I have a microdrive and in comparison I go jogging without skipping...on non paved trails. If this is an issue then you should consider it. If it is going to be sitting on yer console then that's a different story.

[JoeMoon]

...Has anyone found even better pricing?

I recently saw a post somewhere that a USB CF card just entered the market... With that plugged into your CF slot, you can get a 20, 40 or 60GB USB HD and tie it to your PPC...

I sold off my 12 pound notebook and now cart around a 1.5 oz 40GB HD... I simply plug it into any machine that is around and have access to all my personal files and music...

Here is the link for the 20GB for $169: http://shop2.outpost.com/product/3437403

Joe...

[Janak Parekh]

My roommate has one of these in the 2 gig version. it skips on him when he's walking sometimes.
You should suggest to him that he use a caching music player, like PocketMVP.

I recently saw a post somewhere that a USB CF card just entered the market... With that plugged into your CF slot, you can get a 20, 40 or 60GB USB HD and tie it to your PPC...
Yes, in fact, I posted about it on this site. :lol: It's really a different thing though -- external hard drives are not nearly as portable and need a separate power source.

--janak

[Chris Spera]

I also have the 2GB version and use it to house all my WMA's. I like to listen to music while driving; but find it problematic with the new 5455 due to the fact that the headphone jack is on the bottom and I have a revolv Design RoadWriter to hold my gadget in while I drive. I can't get to the jack, so no tunes in the car until I either get a 5455 compatible revolv Design cradle that works with the RoadWriter, or I perform the modifications myself.


Christopher Spera

[Pony99CA]

For those of you still using PC cards on your Pocket PCs, check this deal out.

I'm tempted to get one of these, bundle it with my PC card sleeve with my old 3650, and use it as a cheap iPod-like device (with Ogg support...). Has
anyone found even better pricing?
For $150, it's not bad, but it's not like when the Gateway store was selling the 2 GB drive for $1295 (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2779). :-)

I hope Toshiba will be coming out with a larger drive soon. They've had 5 GB as their maximum for quite a while, but you can get iPods (which use a Toshiba drive, I believe) up to 20 GB.

Steve

[szamot]

Toshiba announced their 10 and 20 gig drives a while back, so maybe this is the reason why they are clearing these out...that would be sweet.

[bcre8v2]

I've been "sniffing" around for these devices for awhile. Obviously the problem is about storage (capacity) and the solutions are varied:

Do I get more CF's/SD's/MMC's? What capacity? Can I also use a PC card adapter with my notebook?

Can I use an external USB drive with my PPC?

With 3.5" drives running ~$1.00/GB this PCMCIA card seems way
overpriced (even applying an old $10.00/GB standard).

(IMHO - I think CF's/SD's are also way overpriced and the market is still hounding all they can get).

[Johan]

with the new 5455 due to the fact that the headphone jack is on the bottom and I have a revolv Design RoadWriter to hold my gadget in while I drive.

Christopher Spera

Actually it seem better to have the headhone jack at the bottom, then it will be possible to make carholder where audio is connected as soon as you put it in the holder.

[Chris Spera]

with the new 5455 due to the fact that the headphone jack is on the bottom and I have a revolv Design RoadWriter to hold my gadget in while I drive.

Christopher Spera

Actually it seem better to have the headhone jack at the bottom, then it will be possible to make carholder where audio is connected as soon as you put it in the holder.

Actually, I don't like that idea. What you end up with then is a cradle very much like the original 31/36/3700 cradle, with a prong that sticks up out of the bottom of the cradle and must be aligned with the power connector in order to get the unit to sit flush with the bottom. Its just one more piece of equipment that will most likely get broken, or will damage the device.

Christopher Spera

[jeffmd]

I would buy the $150 with the 1 year warentee.. simply because in one year we will have bigger and better things out anyways.

my beef however is the PCMCIA on a pocket pc. if you have something like a silver slider or some adapter that encases the PC card in a hard shell, great for you. but if your like a dell owner or someone who would have to use a cf adapter that has a bendable rubber boot for a connector, its positivly the most annoying thing to carry around attached. it looks like crap dangling from the back too.

with CF getting dirt cheap, you could just buy a few 256 or 512 meg CF cards that you could store away in a case or something, and pull out when you want it. that way you wont have anything sticking out of your pda. also battery life wont suffer nearly as much.

[Pony99CA]

with CF getting dirt cheap, you could just buy a few 256 or 512 meg CF cards that you could store away in a case or something, and pull out when you want it. that way you wont have anything sticking out of your pda. also battery life wont suffer nearly as much.
Getting 5 GB with CF cards would still be fairly expensive. Even if you can get a 1 GB card for $100, that's $500 for 5 GB, and you won't have all of your storage accessible at once.

If you don't have access a reasonable PC Card solution, you're out of luck. That's one reason I like my iPAQ 3870 with dual PC Card sleeve. :-)

Steve

[bmhome1]

Just a FYI, I found out the hard way that the drives inside iPods are NOT PCMCIA drives, they are physically smaller and use a different connector/pin design. When you hold a PCMCIA drive next to an iPod, you see there is impossibly little room for the drive to fit inside.

I think Toshiba is concentrating their 10, 20 and larger GB drive manufacturing only for this hybrid form factor design. Personally, with the 2 and 5GB drives at the fire-sale prices, I doubt larger PCMCIA sizes will ever come to market. The PCMCIA hard drive market is shrinking, not growing. The only large potential market for PCMCIA drives, notebooks, never materialized.

I love my dual sleeve 2GB PCMCIA and will get a 5GB too, but don't expect to see any new larger sizes. I hope I'm wrong.

[HYH]

Folks, I just did a quick search, there are white (as shown here in Toshiba site http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/pc/pc_prodDetail.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1659020699.1045792311@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccfadchhjmdglhcgfkceghdgngdglj.0&comm=ST&plin=Storage&pfam=PC%20Cards&poid=200989&Adoid=140838)

and blue (as shown here) label of this PC card.

Anybody know that there are anyway different?

Thanks in advance

[Janak Parekh]

Just a FYI, I found out the hard way that the drives inside iPods are NOT PCMCIA drives, they are physically smaller and use a different connector/pin design. When you hold a PCMCIA drive next to an iPod, you see there is impossibly little room for the drive to fit inside.
Actually, I do believe they're using the same 2.5" hard drive, but remember that the drive in the iPod is equivalent to the PC card drive without its surrounding casing.

--janak

[JoeMoon]

...external hard drives are not nearly as portable and need a separate power source.

Actually, the 40GB drive I am using gets its power from the USB port. No extra cable or power supply needed... I think the 60GB drive needs some additional power - and they supply an extra USB cable to draw some extra power from another USB port - this is useful if electricity is in short supply... Also, as for the portability... The drive is really not much larger than my Dell Axim to begin with... A little velcro and you could mount the drive to the back of the Axim... I don't expect this to be the solution for the guy who wants 20GB of music on his hip while running the Boston Marathon... But if you can handle sitting still for awhile while you access the drive... I can't think of a cheaper solution for storage... BTW: The Dell has a built in SD slot and a seperate built in CF slot...

Joe...

[MikeUnwired]

I've been using one of these since last summer and I'm very happy with it. I tried it with a Compaq iPAQ 3835 and PC Card sleeve and it worked fine. Carrying the whole iPAQ and PC Card sleeve is a little more than a Pocket usually will handle -- my pants start falling down. It really has extended the useful life of my old Toshiba laptop and makes data transfer simple between my laptop and my new Tablet -- as I haven't made the transition yet.

I don't expect it to last forever, so I back it up to my "server" at home regularly to ensure continuity of my brilliance.

[Pony99CA]

Just a FYI, I found out the hard way that the drives inside iPods are NOT PCMCIA drives, they are physically smaller and use a different connector/pin design. When you hold a PCMCIA drive next to an iPod, you see there is impossibly little room for the drive to fit inside.
Actually, I do believe they're using the same 2.5" hard drive, but remember that the drive in the iPod is equivalent to the PC card drive without its surrounding casing.

I basically think the same thing. However, the drive is a 1.8" drive, not a 2.5" drive. If you visit that ridiculously long link :-) HYH posted, they confirm that.

Steve

P.S. My usual rant. Please don't post long links "naked". The board software doesn't wrap them, and it resets the margins for the whole page, forcing horizontal scrolling. Use the URL tags, like this:


[url=http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/pc/pc_prodDetail.jsp?comm=ST&plin=Storage&pfam=PC%20Cards&poid=200989&Adoid=140838]
Toshiba PC Card Drive
[/url]

The above looks like the following when posted:

Toshiba PC Card Drive
(http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/pc/pc_prodDetail.jsp?comm=ST&plin=Storage&pfam=PC%20Cards&poid=200989&Adoid=140838)
See how much nicer that is? :-)

Also, you'll notice that I even shortened the long link. You can remove the BV_SessionID and BV_EngineID parameters if you're comfortable with URLs.