LifeDrive hard drive speed vs Dell Axim 51V Secure Digital speed

[joderias]

Hey, I bought a trascend 150x Secure Digital card for my Axim, allthough I believe the card won't work at any speed higher than 10x :(

Anyway, if you compare the hard drive of the LifeDrive against the Dell Axim 51V, what are the speeds like?

I remember than with my LifeDrive, if you played music, and read an avant go document, things were slow

Technically speaking, what is the speed of the LifeDrive hard drive?
And what is the speed of the Dell Axim with a SD card?

One last question, the LifeDrive and the TX screen is larger than the Axim 51V, would you say that makes the TX better in some way?

I really think this software (including the Windows Mobile version) is much more advanced than the ones available for Palm

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Hey, I bought a trascend 150x Secure Digital card for my Axim, allthough I believe the card won't work at any speed higher than 10x :(


Actually you should be able to get up to 40x.


Anyway, if you compare the hard drive of the LifeDrive against the Dell Axim 51V, what are the speeds like?

I remember than with my LifeDrive, if you played music, and read an avant go document, things were slow


Two different animals - SD and CF cards (or any flash media) typically quote their read speeds and that's all that's really required. With a microdrive, you also have to factor in another variable - seek time. As the hard drive has to physically move the drive arm to read different parts of the drive, that adds time to your read speed. In addition, most drives are designed to spin down to save power, and when you access the drive, it takes time for the platters to spin up again - another speed killer.

Flash media has extremely minimal seek time (largely due to reading the FAT, no physical movement required), and don't need to 'warm up' to use. Hence in day-to day use, flash memory will win any speed contest hands down. There was a speed test between two otherwise identical handtops a couple of months back - one with a standard HDD, the other with a flash drive - and the bootup times were measured for WinXP. The flash drive handtop booted in under 20secs, while the HDD handtop took over two minutes.


Technically speaking, what is the speed of the LifeDrive hard drive?

If you can tell me who manufactured the drive, I can probably get those figures for you. There's really only two at the moment (IBM/Hitachi and Seagate), though I hear a Chinese company is entering the fray for 1" drives.


One last question, the LifeDrive and the TX screen is larger than the Axim 51V, would you say that makes the TX better in some way?

I don't agree - the Lifedrive and TX use HVGA screens (480x320) while the Axim is VGA (640x480). That makes the Axim far more usable for text editing, web browsing, multimedia, ebook reading, etc etc etc. Now if you were talking about it's color reproduction, I might agree with you :wink: