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Motion LS800 table HD failure at 14,000 feet
In rec.aviation.misc Peter wrote:
Flash alternatives (I believe it is a 1.8" HD inside) are extremely costly, around USD 2000 for 8GB, and I wonder how successful it would be to put in a 4GB SD card (for which there is a slot), put all maps on that, etc. I recently did something like this at work, for somewhat the same reason. In my case, I had a couple of accelerometers connected to a data acquisition card in an old desktop PC. The accelerometers got bolted into a car that was going to be crash-tested, and the PC got to go along for the ride. We decided that a rotating-platter drive probably wouldn't cut it, and looked for alternatives. What we ended up using was an "IDE 4000" series flash drive from M-Systems. This is flash memory in a package with an IDE connector; it looks and works just like a regular hard drive to the operating system. M-Systems sells a couple of different lines of drives - the ones that support the latest and fastest interfaces (Ultra ATA and SATA) are indeed expensive - about US$850-$900 for 2 GB. The IDE 4000 series is not quite as fast but is much cheaper; around $200- $250 for 2 GB in a 3.5" drive. We bought a 2 GB drive from Digi-Key, http://www.digi-key.com/ - current catalog page http://dkc3.digikey.com/PDF/T063/0865.pdf . This system was so old that it was running Windows 98. With the regular hard drive still in the system, I uninstalled all unneeded programs and got the total installed size of the system down to well under 1 GB. I then installed the flash drive and did a drive image copy from the hard drive to the flash drive (think Norton Ghost or similar). Then I removed the hard drive and let the system boot up on the flash drive... no problem. Benchmarking programs showed that the flash drive was indeed slower than the hard drive, but neither Windows nor the data-acquisition software seemed to care - I could still log data to the flash drive as fast as I needed to. The computer and the flash drive survived the wreck and everyone was happy. The problem is that Windoze itself accesses various bits of the HD anyway, and does anyone know which bits, and can they be moved to the SD card? Microsoft knows but they ain't tellin'. I think it's possible to split things up like this, but it will take a lot of trial and error to make sure you've got everything you need on the SD card. Even then, if you accidentally click on the wrong icon or something, Windows may still try to spin up the hard drive. If you have a real Windows installation CD (not a "restore" CD provided by the computer manufacturer), it might be interesting to remove the hard drive from the PC, install the SD card, boot up the Windows install CD, and see if you can convince it to install onto the SD card instead. If that doesn't work, then buying a flash drive that has an IDE interface, installing it along with your current hard drive, and doing a disk copy from your current drive to the flash drive (assuming you can fit everything onto the flash drive) will probably work. If there aren't enough hard drive connections on your portable PC, you may have to temporarily install both drives on a desktop PC to do the drive copy, then put the flash drive back in the portable. I hope this helps! Matt Roberds |
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Motion LS800 table HD failure at 14,000 feet
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Motion LS800 table HD failure at 14,000 feet
In rec.aviation.misc Peter wrote:
I need at least 8GB and in 1.8" format, and it doesn't seem to be available. I think M-Systems has flash disks in 1.8", but Digi-Key doesn't carry that line. I don't know how much storage they offer in 1.8". An alternative might be to buy a 2.5" or 3.5" IDE flash disk and put it in an external USB enclosure. This will probably work a lot better if your portable PC has USB 2.0 ports and you use a USB 2.0 enclosure. The other thing is that the BIOS doesn't support the SD slot as a bootable block device, so one couldn't (AFAIK) install windoze on the SD card directly. You might have to install it somewhere else, image it over to the SD card, and then use something like Smart Boot Manager http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html to boot from the SD card. I've used SBM on a floppy to boot various installation CDs on an older PC that didn't have a BIOS setting for booting from CD. Of course your PC probably doesn't have a floppy, so you'll have to be creative. I am just curious what "altitude" solutions the GA vendors are offering... they can't all pack up at 14k, or can they???? I can think of a few reasons this wouldn't work, like condensation, poking holes in it with the stylus, and dying of embarrasment if anyone sees it, but how about a big Ziploc-type plastic bag? Wait until 10000 or so, put the PC in the bag, seal it up, and the PC has a nice little pressurized compartment to live in. OK, having a bag failure take out all of your navigation information probably isn't the best idea. Maybe put a normal hard drive in a USB enclosure, then put the USB enclosure in a Pelican case or similar and figure out a way to seal around the cable. Matt Roberds |
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