Glass Lantern, LLC - Article: Pocket PC Drives

Hard disk storage with a Pocket PC
October 9, 2003

Although there are a variety of possible solutions for connecting a hard disk to a Pocket PC, we currently only recommend two kits.

Kit #1: Maximum portability, low power, good speed

HP iPaq 5555 (or a 3800/3900 series device if you can find one)
HP Dual PC Card Expansion Pack (If your camera uses SD cards, you could use a single slot PC Card Expansion Pack instead.)
A Compact Flash to PC Card adapter.
PCMCIA hard disk, currently available in 2GB and 5GB sizes, such as the MK2001MPL Toshiba drive.

(note: iPaq 3600 shown, not a 5555)

This kit is highly portable, uses minimal power, and has the fastest transfer we're aware of with a Pocket PC. It is pretty expensive, but you can use it on the go and in your camera bag with no problems. As shown above, you insert your Compact Flash card into one of the expansion pack's two slots, and the PCMCIA hard drive into the other. Pixfer then transfers the images off of the CF card onto the drive. The advantages of this kit include:

Small: PCMCIA hard disks are small, and fit entirely into the expansion pack. You can hold the entire setup in one hand, making it very easy to use in the field.
Low power: PCMCIA drives are remarkably power frugal.
Easy to set up: No additional drivers are needed - the Pocket PC recognizes the drive like any other storage card.
Performance: Over 500KB/s when writing to the drive from a storage card with Pixfer. A 512MB CF card can be transferred in about 15 minutes.

Downsides:

Under Pocket PC 2002, there was a Storage Brick driver for using external hard disks with a PCMCIA connector, such as the inexpensive Travelstar 8E drive. This driver does not work under Windows Mobile 2003, and is unlikely to be updated. If you want to use one of these drives, you must stay with an older Pocket PC running Pocket PC 2002, and not upgrade to Windows Mobile 2003. UPDATE 7/12/2004: It appears that some users have figured out how to tweak things to make this driver work under Pocket PC 2003. Your mileage may vary, but it may be worth trying if you want to use these larger PCMCIA drives.
It is unknown whether Toshiba will continue to sell these PCMCIA drives. They were going to sell a 15GB version of the drive, and it was available for preorder at one time, but we can no longer locate any information on purchasing this drive. 2GB drives are sometimes available, and the 5GB version is readily available, but may be phased out in the future if Toshiba is discontinuing the product.

Kit #2: Large capacity, low cost

Toshiba e755 Pocket PC
Either a USB host cable, or the Toshiba Expansion Pack, which provides a USB host connection. (The built-in USB support is client only, which allows the device to synchronize to a PC, but does not allow a hard drive to be connected.)
A USB 2.0 external hard disk, such as the Anypak, although many other drives will probably work. We currently test with a Compucable Firexpress 250SX.
The Anypak Pocket PC Windows Mobile 2003 USB mass storage driver. There is a free version of this driver available for the e740 running Pocket PC 2002, but it is not as well supported.

This kit can work fine if you have power and room to lay everything out each evening to do your transfers, but does not work as well if you are transferring on the go with the Pocket PC in your camera bag. We recommend this kit if you have enough cards to get through an entire day of shooting, then need to transfer to disk at the end of the day. The advantages of this kit are:

Inexpensive: The Toshiba e755 is remarkably inexpensive given the functionality it provides, including built in Wi-Fi, a large screen, and both SD & CF slots. In addition, USB hard disks are much less expensive than PCMCIA disks.
Standard hard disk storage: It uses a standard USB hard disk, which will work quickly and easily with any modern PC or laptop - transferring images when you get back to your main machine is fast and easy.
Large capacity: We test with a 60GB hard disk, which can easily hold thousands of images even in RAW format.

Downsides:

Multiple parts: the device connects to the hard disk via a USB cable, which makes it harder to do on the fly since you have to juggle multiple pieces, including a battery pack to power the drive.
Power Hungry: You need a power cable or battery pack to run the USB drive - the Toshiba battery is not powerful enough alone.
Slow: We get about 288KB/s when writing to the USB hard disk, which means that transferring a 512MB card takes around a half hour.
The Anypak USB mass storage driver is a bit flakey. We have never found any data corruption issues, but have had occasional device lockups when disconnecting the drive. As it stands, this is an annoyance, not a data integrity issue.
No screen poweroff possible: The Pixfer functionality of turning off the screen during the transfer also deactivates the Anypak USB driver, so the screen must be left on for the entire time, which not only drains the battery faster, but also leaves the screen active for tapping. This can cause a problem if you are transferring while the device is banging around in your camera bag, since you don't know what random tapping will hit.
Windows Mobile 2003, at least on the e755, has significant performance problems with large hard disks - basically, there can be a long pause when first writing to a USB hard disk or calculating how much space is free on the disk. Pixfer works around this issue as much as possible, but it is still an issue. Formatting your disk with the largest block size possible can help somewhat.

Notes on other possible solutions

Although we do not recommend these options due to the drawbacks mentioned in the descriptions below, they may be useful for some of you, or at least give you an indication of why we do not recommend them.

Ratoc sells a Compact Flash USB host adapter bundled with a mass storage driver. It does not run under Windows Mobile 2003, so is only an option on older devices. We do not have information about this device's performance or reliability.
PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapters. If you wish to use a PCMCIA hard drive, but do not have a slot to plug it into, there is an adapter from semsons.com that will let you plug a PCMCIA card into a CF slot. Although this appears to work in many cases, it could potentially cause problems due to large power requirements the CF slot is not set up to handle. One case where you may be able to use this would be to transfer from CF to PCMCIA on a Toshiba e755, as follows: Plug the CF card into a USB CF reader. Plug this into a USB host adapter attached to the e755. Connect the PCMCIA drive to the CF slot using the PCMCIA->CF adapter. Do the transfer. Note that not all USB CF card readers are compatible with the Anypak driver, however, so make sure you can return the adapter if it does not work.
Using a PCMCIA hard drive with an iPaq 2200 series device with a PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapter sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately, the iPaq 2200 battery is not powerful enough to run the PCMCIA hard drives through this adapter, so this is not a realistic option.
If you still use Pocket PC 2002 and do not intend to upgrade to Windows Mobile 2003, you can use an external PCMCIA connector drive. These are more bulky, but can be very inexpensive. They are essentially a laptop hard drive in a box attached to a cable ending in a PCMCIA card adapter. You plug the adapter into a PCMCIA slot for your Pocket PC, and it appears on the device like any other storage card. Examples include the IBM Travelstar 8E 8.1GB hard drive. (Around $50) You'll need a (currently free) driver for most of these drives. Check out the Storage Brick driver for more information and a list of additional compatible drives. This is probably the least expensive storage you're going to find...at the downside of size, convenience, and battery life.
If you use a Toshiba e740 Pocket PC, which runs Pocket PC 2002, there is an older version of the Anypak USB driver for USB hard drives. Note that this is not supported by Anypak, and requires significant technical ability to install properly.
Direct camera connection. Why not just hook up your camera directly to the Pocket PC and transfer the images off? For cameras that appear as a normal hard disk via a USB connection on a standard desktop PC, the above USB solutions may work with a direct camera connection. The key is whether the camera truly supports the "mass storage" USB specification. If so, it should function no differently than an external USB hard drive.
JVC MP-PV331 Pocket PC with built-in USB host: Unfortunately, the word on the street is that this device has at least been delayed. If released in the future, it may be a very good choice for image transfer to USB disks, but performance and reliability remain to be seen.
The Toshiba e550g does have a PCMCIA expansion pack, but it is only sold in Japan. Someone used pdakobo to send him one, and it apparently works fine with storage PCMCIA cards. Information can be found on the e550g Fan Site accessories page.
Dell Axim and storage: We have not found a way to connect a CF card and a PCMCIA drive to a Dell Axim device. The semsons PCMCIA->CF adapter may make a PCMCIA drive work, but it would tie up the only CF slot on the device, and this is not a particularly robust solution even if it would work.
The Casio e200 Pocket PC had a PCMCIA sleeve available, but Casio is no longer in the Pocket PC business.

Future possibilities

Hopefully more and more options will become available for storing large amounts of data with a Pocket PC. Some possibilities include:

The Toshiba e755 USB disk solution is not ideal in part because of all of the disparate parts. It would be feasible to attach a NiMh AA battery pack to the back of the external USB drive for power, then attach the drive to the back of a Toshiba extended battery. We have not tried this yet, but it would result in a 60GB Toshiba Pocket PC that could do image transfers without any extra cables or parts.
Wireless transfer of images directly from the camera to a Pocket PC, such as with the WiFi add-on to the upcoming Nikon D2h SLR camera.
A wireless link to a hard drive such as the Toshiba Hopbit. Unfortunately, Bluetooth is far too slow to make this reasonable for large image files.
With the success of items like the Apple iPod, we hope that Pocket PC manufacturers begin to add large storage directly to their products, but we do not have any information about any such plans.

Power management & accessories

If you're out of battery power, your Pocket PC will do an excellent imitation of a paperweight. Fortunately, it isn't difficult or expensive to bring along some extra power. First, some general battery tips:

If you are transferring pictures from a card to a disk, it will take longer with slower Compact Flash cards and your battery life will be reduced. Fast cards are not drastically more expensive than slow cards. Rob Galbraith and DPReview have lists of which cards are fast and which are slow.
If you're going to be driving on your trip, consider a car lighter power adapter.
Cold weather can kill your battery life very quickly. Try to do transfers while the battery is warm.

Even with these tips, Pocket PC will still eventually run out of power, but there are many solutions for getting more even when you are away from an outlet. With all of these options, make sure you get a cable and connector that will work with your specific Pocket PC. Fortunately, many of the Pocket PC devices use the same connector.

There are power extenders that take AA (or larger) batteries to power your Pocket PC, from suppliers such as Semsons & Co. Or, you can build your own. Some take alkalines, and some will take rechargeable batteries, preferably NiMH.
The Electric Fuel Instant Power cartridge is powerful and lightweight.
The Digital Camera Battery company has made cables at least for the Compaq iPaq, although they don't list them on their site. Inquire and perhaps they will make one for you.
Solar chargers, ranging from the do-it-yourself approach, to commercial products such as the iSun or the Pocket-Pal. Read up on these, as some people say they work great, and others give them the thumbs-down.
Perhaps at some point we'll be able to wind up our Pocket PCs to charge them up.
Most manufacturers have an array of charging options, such as car chargers. Check with the company that created your Pocket PC.

Update History

07/12/2004	Added link & note about some users getting the Storage Brick driver working under Pocket PC 2003.
10/09/2003	First posted, using some content from older articles in addition to new information.

Disclaimer

Articles attempt to provide accurate and timely data, but use this information at your own risk; Glass Lantern, LLC is not responsible for any bad experiences due to inaccuracies, exclusions, or other issues, and does not vouch for any of the products or suppliers in this article, which is meant to provide guidance only. Make sure you are comfortable with the solution you decide to use through your own research, and investigate any company before handing over your credit card. Now go take pictures.