Crazieeman's Journal: Technological question

Regarding PDAs, I still have not seen one designed with a 2 1/2 inch hard drive. Why not? I'd buy one. Standard PDA memory could be replaced with RAM, and in essence, you would have a true palm PC.

What are the restrictions here?

One I can see most definitely is heat. But what of processor speeds, bus and memory bandwidth, and RAM capacity in general?

Several reasons

[ncc74656]

1. Hard drives take time to spin up. You don't want to wait for it to spin up when you just want to jot a quick note.
2. Hard drives are fairly delicate mechanical devices that don't hold up well to abuse...you wouldn't want to keep one in your pocket. (That's why you most likely will never see me buying an iPod or other hard-drive-based music player.)
3. Hard drives suck down power like nobody's business. When you're running on a couple of AAAs, you don't have that much power to spare.

Those are three r

Re:Several reasons

[Cyberdyne]

Cost is probably another factor - those tiny little HDDs are much more expensive than the full-size versions. I suspect power's the biggest factor though: even HDD based MP3 players try very hard to keep the HDD turned off as much as possible, just reading occasional big bursts into memory - and even then, battery life isn't as much as I'd hope for in a PDA.

Having said that, IIRC some PDAs come with PCMCIA slots - in which case you could presumably fit an IBM Microdrive...