The IBM 40 Mb PCMCIA HD's I have eat 5V 800mA; The Maxtor 171 Mb PCMCIA HD I have eats 5V 700mA; Seagate ST7050p (42 Mb drive) data is at http://www.seagate.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?/at/st7050p.txt (it eats .45A start-up, .45Watts Idle, 1.2W Active http://www.integralnet.com/ SHOULD list Integral HD's (They make the Viper line) but I can't get there from here (their server may be down now?) I'd guess it'd use 500mA to 800mA, and lean towards about 5-600mA as HD makers are learning to be more & more efficient.) I'm told the Viper is a nice fast drive. Other companies (Western Digital, etc.) probably have data, but this should give you an idea of the needs of some PCMCIA HD's at least. Flash uses much less power, but is more expensive & has had limits on how many times you can write to it (mostly fixed, that), is faster access-wise, though. You could put 2 flash units in (price goes up steeper & steeper as capacity goes up), one for boot, one for data, or even put a Flash drive in for boot & a small HD for data (and only turn the PCMCIA HD on when you needed to write data to it or read data off of it) & save power either way. One nice thing about PCMCIA devices: 5V only for power. Might remove the need for +12V altogether. (laptop drives, of course, also only need +5V, but I thought about using a desktop drive for a wearable, am leaning away more & more as I think about it...) Mark WillisAndrew Taylor wrote: > > I was looking into using a PCMCIA HD in a wearable. Is a PCMCIA HD better > than say a standard Laptop HD (money is not a big issue, Power/Performance > is)? Is there a web page with power requirements for PCMCIA Hard Drives? > > Thanks, > Andy >
From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH)
Maintained by R. Paul McCarty
Archive created with babymail