I was well on my way to finishing some performance tests and had planned on using the PD70x for my 4th of July gig for the 'In the Field' section, when disaster struck. My hard drive bit the dust. Mind you this was not a new drive and had lots of hours on it, but it had always been reliable. Not anymore, it's toast. It was an IBM 40GN 40GB ball bearing drive. It's sad too since the performance tests were excellent and the battery life was phenomenal. With a set of Sanyo 2500ma NmHi cells that had been pre-condition charged 10 times, I was able to transfer 855MB of data in 322 files (my reference data set for these tests) from a Sandisk Ultra-II 1GB CF card 95-96 times! Using a 1GB IBM Microdrive I was able to transfer the same data set 25 times. That's just incredible! I doubt I'll be able to match these results with a newer drive using Fluid Dynamic Bearings, but only time will tell. I should have some results and the rest of the review in about a week.

At this point quite a few questions came to mind:

1) Did the drive just give up? After all, PSDs are hard on drives since the drive spins down after each card copy.
2) Did the PD70x go bonkers, and there's nothing wrong with the drive?
3) Did the PD70x damage the drive due to an improper supply voltage being applied to the drive?
4) Did the PD70x damage the drive's data or control lines because a PD70x custom chip shorted out?

while I have my doubts about any possibility other than number 1, I still need to do some tests. First I made sure the drive was really dead. I tried it on a spare test computer I have laying around, and sure enough, it's dead. So number 1 is still a possibility but number 2 is put to bed.

I'll perform some voltage tests on the PD70x's 5vdc and 3.3vdc busses sometime tomorrow (both open circuit and under load), and post the results. My guess is they will be fine which will put to bed number 3. The only one that cannot be qualified is number 4, and the only way to test is with another drive. I should have this in a few days. I really can't imagine a chip failure mode that would apply enough voltage to instantly damage the drive since the supply voltages are essentially the same as the control voltages for the most part.

This event illustrates why I recommend using two PSDs in the field. Hiking or walking around with a hard drive full of images attached to your belt is eventually going to bite you. Just think what a mess I would have been in if the drive had decided to fail half way through my 4th of July gig and I only used one PSD. I ended up using my PD7x and one of my old X-Drives. I thought of pulling a drive from one of these two units, but what if it is something wrong with the PD70x? Then I'll only have one PSD available for the 4th. That's not acceptable to me so I'll just wait for the new drive and hope for the best. BTW, I'm not stupid enough to initially place the new drive in the PD70x. Once I have the new drive in hand, I'll pull the drive from my X-Drive for testing and run it a day or two.

I should have the new drive in a few days and will re-run the tests. It's not a lot of fun and it's quite time consuming. but I need to do it in order to insure accurate data for the device tested. I'll try to get the rest of the review posted in about a week or so.