Credit Card HDD's

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Rookio

VIP Member
Feb 15, 2005
3,804
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Sydney, Australia
Hey!

Anybody know the name of those tiny credit card sized HDD's?
Even better, anybody ever used one? I'm curious to know if they are worth all of that extra $$$. I'm making an xbox that I can carry around with me, so i want it to be light (I ride a push bike often so i don't want the full weight of an xbox on top of my back!)

I'll leave the DVD out, with any games that i want to play being backed up on the hdd, so after i get a nice light weight HDD as well... i'll be laughin'

Thanks guys!
 
D

digthebox

VIP Member
Dec 2, 2004
595
0
UK
MICRODRIVES

Rookio,

Firstly great idea. Microdrives is the term you are looking for! I laughed, reminded me of my Sincalir Spectrum days. Take a look at the Toshiba MK3006GAL. It's a 30gb drive a weighs in at 1.8" form factor, so really is credit card sized.

The drives are based on single platter technology and run at an average of 4200RPM - so not the quickest drive in the world, in real world terms about 15 - 20MB/S - but hey it's a small sacrifice. Plus these things are quiet as you like. The drives are fully jumper donfigurable to make it master or slave so much like a standard PC drive.

The catch with these drives is the interface they use is not standard IDE out of the box. But all is not lost. There are adapters availible for it. The adapter you will be interested in is the ATA/100 converter, converts the custom style connection to standard IDE/POWER connectors that would couple up to your xbox nicely. These adapters can be picked up for little money. Now these drives also need no drivers so I cannot see you are going to have any problems getting this to work on an XBOX. All tests we have done with these drives by plugging them into PC has been succesful first time using 98, XP and for my sins Windows ME so compatibility seems to be there!

I have no idea where you would pick these drives up down in australia, but here in the UK they are slowly becoming popular being intergrated into portable Mp3 players etc etc.

This will be an interesting thread to follow and I wish you success. Keep us posted.
 
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Rookio

VIP Member
Feb 15, 2005
3,804
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Sydney, Australia
Hey Guys, Thanks a lot for all the info, that website was really helpful.
I found a couple of drives on sale:

Same model as you suggested $125 USD ($165 AUD)
or a 60Gb variant $187 USD ($247 AUD)

That's before shipping costs to Aus also.... The only 1.8 HDD I found doing a goole search in australian sites was those external drives selling for rediculous amounts up to $500 AUS
CRAZY!

Thats a lot of money for a HDD... I don't think this will be worth doing.
For that much I could almost buy a 300Gb IDE drive... Perhaps I'll find a way of moving the hdd mount to the middle of the xbox to even out the weight and leave it at that.

If i ever do anything about this i'll post here to let you guys know.

Thanks again for the help :)
 
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