iPod/PDA

[Yianni]

Here's a question for all the geeks out there.

I know that you can use the iPod as a portable Hard Drive, but how would one go about connecting an iPod to a PDA and mounting the drive?

Could you do it? That way, you could have all the storage of a Hard Drive but on a PDA. You could transfer files from the HDD to the SD/CF/Memory Stick on the PDA at will.

I think the iPod uses HFS as a file system. Now there are products that allow you to read HFS on XP, but I don't think that any exist on PPC or Palm. I think some exist on Linux, but I don't really want to run Linux on my PDA.

I'm sure that PDA's will all have HDD's soon anyway, but is there anyone who knows if this could be done now?

 

[Desredandwhite]

The iPod can easily be reformatted to function as a PC hard drive (Apple has windows installers available for download alongside the Mac versions). However, I'm pretty certain there is no way of connecting a FireWire device to a PDA (and only limited ways of connecting via USB).

To be honest, I'm not sure if I ever want a hard-drive based PDA. It would make it too bulky and heavy for some, and would definitely increase the chance of failure (due to the hard drive being a mechanical device vs the solid state memory of CF, SD etc). It MAY be useful as a big-ass all-in-one solution, but I'd personally find little use for a PDA with mega-storage. If I want to listen to mp3s, I'll use the iPod on its own

Of course, you might have other ideas and priorities

 

[Nandrolone Stam]

The iPod now has a media card reader (for the new 3rd generation ipods). I think it is only reading from the card to the iPod HDD, not vice versa. Maybe worth checking out?