I took a flier on a 4Gb microDrive on eBay, and got a crash-course in microDrive compatibility and functions. It helped that a senior engineer for Hitachi (William F. Heybruck, Ph.D) was very forthcoming with some clarifications about CFIO and IDE interfaces for these suckers.
To wit: the 4Gb microDrive I bought was OEM, and mask ROM set to IDE. This means what, exactly? It means it won't work in digital cameras (mostly) and PDAs (definitely), since CFIO is the preferred (and driverless) option. It read in the card reader, which does use IDE interfacing for the cards it reads (most do). This is how you get the virtual drive letter functionality in a Windows OS.
So, back to microDrives. To confirm the suspicion that I bought an IDE version, I emailed Bill Heybruck. I'd gotten some pointers on Aximsite, Dell's own support forums, some digital media spots, but each pointer lacked authority . A Hitachi engineer working on microDrives is the ultimate authority, and he gave me the simple explanation: the ROM is masked in hardware, it cannot be altered by any means other than in a clean room with engineering toolsets, and white or blue label retail kits are what I'd need for CFIO.
Boom. Bill's a terrific guy and I like engineers who talk straight, and thus, I returned the 4Gb and figured, if I'm buying retail, let's go big (go big or go home). Amazon had it cheaper, with free shipping, than anyone else who was reputable.
Normally Amazon's super-saver shipping can take nine days. I got my box (looking beat to utter crap) in a day. Wow, this is incredible luck. Popped it into the Axim...
Now here's where things turned out different. The 4Gb spawned all sorts of unrecognized card errors. This spawned nothing, but Resco's File Explorer showed a CF card with 5.71Gb available.
Uh-huh. 5.71Gb on a PDA. It has more storage than a Palm LifeDrive. And it's removable.
I loaded it up with music using a card reader; I'd heard USB 2.0 transfers would be much faster than cradle syncs. Tonight, I test it out and let you know what it sounds like, and how the HDD works.
-BrAp
