Use Seagate pocket drive as memory for Dell X50....worth it?

[sladezero]

Hey there,

I have a Seagate 5 GB pocket drive (circular) that has ~3.5-4GB left on it.
I will really be needing more memory for my Dell X50. My idea was to
buy the Raton USB CF card for it to use my left over space for.
However, they want $139.99 for it. When I looked around Newegg
the best I can get for ~$100-150 is about 1GB. Do you all think
I should get the card and use the pocket drive as the memory?
I will be traveling alot so, this seemed like the best bet.
Opinions welcomed here.

Thank you.

Slade

[PetiteFlower]

You can get a 1 gig SD card for less then $100 now. I don't know what CF memory is running right now but you can probably get at least 2 gig CF card for $100. That's just a guess. Why would you want a (battery hogging, breakable) hard drive when you could get (durable, fits right in the PPC) flash cards?

[JPD6825]

You can get a 2GB microdrive at Computer Geeks http://www.geeks.com for $63. At that price I think it is a handy thing - even if you don't keep it in all the time - if you find you cannot tolerate the battery drain.

[Sven Johannsen]

I'd love to hear from someone that has actually used the RATOC USB Host adapter. While I have seen reports of it working, and places to find drivers for various things, most seem relegated to W?BIC scenarios.

My concern would be the ability for the adapter to supply power to the USB device, hard drive, USB thumb drive, keyboard, etc. While I am sure it does supply some power, I don't imagine it would power an external hard drive, or if it does, not very long. That means you need some sort of power source, whether plug in, or battery. Battery sources tend to be a bit bulky. So you wind up with a PPC, a hard drive, a battery pack, and a jumble of wires to hook it all together. That might be an OK system if you are cobbling something together to get pictures of an SD card onto a little hard drive. For portable file storage, like music or videos, or GPS maps, it would seem a bit ungainly to me.

You can get a 4G microdrive for under $200 easily (http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=5555167/) If you subract out the $140 for the RATOC card you are thinking of getting, you are out $60 for a pretty significant amount of storage. Yea the uDrive uses battery, but the convenience compared to the external drive kludge has to considered. It doesn't have to stay in all the time, and is a lot easier to carry seperatly than the Ratoc, drive, power source combo.

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Just my opinion, but I don't think going through that expense for 3GB-4GB is really worth it. 20GB to 40GB however might make it worthwhile, but that would incur additional expense. You have to remember, you're talking about USB 1.1 transfer speeds here, and it has to go through the CF interface as well. From my experience with USB host, even 1.1 speeds are not quite acheivable - mp3s are fine, but movies running at 1MBps will stutter, and file transfer takes ages.

Sven is quite right about the power issue - I seriously doubt the Ratoc card could supply much more than the 100ma that other USB host enabled PPCs can supply; and this is simply not sufficient to startup a hard drive, even a 1.8" like the Seagate you have. IIRC the Seagate needs about 400-500 ma to start the drive spinning, and 2.5" drives even more. I use a 40GB 2.5" HDD in a Sarotech OTG box for external storage, and it works fine - but the box has its own internal LIon battery and it isn't cheap. Battery life is pretty weak as well - the manufacturer states 40 min of continuous use, which is on par with other similar boxes. This is fine for say photo backups and such, but watching movies or big file transfers aren't really a realistic proposition.

[footman]

I bought a Ratoc USB thingy here in UK. It seemed to work well at first allowing me to access a portable hard drive and my MP3 player easily. Oddly this became unstable and I,m trying to get an RMA from the UK vendor but theyve gone deaf!