TJOtala

I have created a 20GB “storage brick” from a IBM Travelstar 20GN drive mounted inside an Addonics Pocket ExDrive enclosure kit. The drive is connected to my Compaq iPAQ H3630 using a PC Card Expansion Pack and the Addonics PCMCIA adapter/cable.

News Flash

NOTE: I am no longer actively supporting this project. I have no plans for adding support for Windows Mobile 2003, or any other future PocketPC version.

With the help of other users, I’ve been able to verify that the driver works with several other devices besides the Addonics device I used. Please see the FAQ for more information, and download the latest driver version.

Evolution

The ExDrive works fine when connected to a laptop running Windows 2000 or Windows 9x: it shows up as a “Standard IDE/ATA Drive” with no special drivers required. However, the standard ATADISK.DLL driver that ships with PocketPC operating system fails to recognize it as a valid IDE/ATA device. The same driver does recognize plenty of other removable media devices in both PCMCIA and CompactFlash (CF) form factors, for instance the IBM MicroDrive as well as various flash memory cards.

It turns out that the standard ATADISK.DLL driver is simply a bit dense as well as picky. I was able to create a new device driver based some minor modifications to the original ATADISK.DLL driver code from the Microsoft Windows CE Platform Builder 3.0 package. You can download this modified driver below.

Below you will see how the new drive appears on the Compaq iPAQ from software perspective. The storage brick appears named as Storage Brick simply because I overrode that default name in my driver setup. Otherwise, it would show up as Storage Card as usual.

	This is a screenshot of SnoopSoft Dashboard running my FreeSpace plug-in that shows disk space available to be roughly 19GB after copying some test files onto the new drive. The drive is obviously formatted as FAT32 since FAT16 only supports up to 2GB capacity.
	Here are screenshots of Resco File Explorer showing a view of the new drive. The first screenshot shows the drive formatted as a single FAT32 volume, whereas the second screenshot shows the drive formatted as two volumes, a 16GB FAT32 volume and a 2GB FAT16 volume.
	Here are screenshots of Philippe Majerus’ Device Manager showing how the new drive appears to the system.

Battery Life

I have conducted a simple test to measure battery life using a real-life scenario:

1. Copy several hundred Windows Media Audio (WMA) files to the Storage Brick. My test set was about 140 songs occupying more than 300MB of disk space.
2. Attach the Storage Brick to the iPAQ using the PCMCIA adapter/cable.
3. Check that both the iPAQ as well as the Expansion Pack batteries are fully charged.
4. Unplug any AC adapters supplying the iPAQ, the Expansion Pack, or the Storage Brick.
5. Launch Windows Media Player.
6. Start shuffle play of all songs.
7. Turn off display.
8. Start timer.
9. Wait until either the iPAQ or the Expansion Pack runs low on power.

After about 2hr 15min of continuous playback, the Expansion Pack battery dropped to critically low level, prompting the system to shut it down completely. At that time the iPAQ battery was still about 3/4 full.

Note: I used is the single slot PC Card Expansion Pack (Compaq part #170338-B21) which houses a single Lithium-Ion Polymer battery, the same as the one inside the iPAQ itself. The battery life would likely be longer if you use the dual slot PC Card Expansion Pack (Compaq part #216198-B21) which houses two such batteries. J. D. Forinash has reported battery life of about 4hr 8min using the dual slot Expansion Pack with a Compaq iPAQ H3150 (the monochrome model).

Parts

Tests

I have run the driver through several test suites included in the Microsoft Windows CE Platform Builder package. You can view the testing coverage and results here.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

You can find a list of most frequently asked questions and answers here.

Media Coverage

Below you can find links to media coverage of this solution.

Conclusions

Well, that’s really all there is to it. Whopping 20GB of on-the-road storage! To put things in perspective, let’s assume an average of 4MB per MP3, that translates to about 4,750 songs… or put another way, about 12,700 digital pictures assuming an average of 1.5MB per picture.

Oh yes, and this is about twice the storage I have on my IBM ThinkPad laptop ;-D

Supported Platforms:	PocketPC (ARM, MIPS, SH3), PocketPC 2002 (ARM), Handheld PC 2000 (ARM)
Tested Platforms:	Compaq iPAQ H36xx, H37xx, H38xx (PocketPC, ARM), HP Jornada 720 (Handheld PC, ARM), URThere @migo (PocketPC, ARM)
Download Link:	exdrive.exe (68.50KB)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 1st, 2004 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Software, Windows CE, PocketPC, Hardware, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.