PCMCIA Card bus solution

[caseyhayward]

Hey guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster. I love this forum. My question has to do with an earlier post which I could not relocate when I came to ask this question. It is as follows:

Theoretically, what's to keep this camera from recognizing a SATA PCMCIA cardbus plugged into the P2 port and writing to an attached, sizeable SATA drive? Yes you would be tethered to something, but it seems like a more probable solution than an off the shelf FW or USB drive. I mean the cam may not be looking to write data out of its FW port but it will be looking for a place to write data in the P2 slot.

Comments and clarifications on this brainstorm are welcome.

[Barry_Green]

We've discussed this before. I believe Jan actually tried it out, using one of those microdrives on a PCMCIA card, testing it in an existing P2 camera (the SPX800). From her report it sounded like it would have worked if the drive had been fast enough, but the microdrives are nowhere near fast enough to support the data rates.

What you theorize here sounds entirely, completely practical. I have no doubt that some entrepreneur will design and built a PCMCIA/P2-compatible card-to-firewire/USB2 adapter, which will present itself to the camera as if it's a P2 card, and will allow the use of off-the-shelf firewire or USB2 hard drives.

In fact, if someone else doesn't build it, maybe I'll hire an E.E. and we'll figure it out and build it. I can see it fitting in the slot and having a cable that mounts to a shoe-mounted hard disk (a la FS-4) or included a bottom-mounted cage where you slide an off-the-shelf hard disk right in.

I am certain that this product will come to market, from some manufacturer or other.

[fiercecurry]

This would be great, the only other problem is.........has to be battery powered, unless you have an AC outlet nearby. Quickstream and Firestore work kind of well because they go off battery, an SATA will not, unless you build a housing for it that supports batteries. Just one more challenge, but i am sure that could be overcome as well. Lets hope.

[Barry_Green]

I'm hoping for a bus-powered firewire port or bus-powered USB2 port. That way you could draw all the power from the camcorder battery.

Would that even be practical?

Would be really cool if you could...

[dop16mm]

cardbus firewire adapters already exit, and are in regular use on powerbooks as for the battery powered hard drive, shouldn't be that hard, just use a case that comes with an external transformer and match the voltage, rechargables are available in just about any voltage you would want. The camera is at least six months away, If panasonic doesn't come through with all the features you want I'm sure third party developers will. Just keep throwing out ideas.

[judas77]

No way. I have teste today.

I have connected a USB 2.0 Card bus adapter to a external HDD and a USB stick and the camera don't swallow it.

This is not a speed question. The camera show "Incompatible card" after a few seconds of trying.

I have format the hdd in fat32, unformatted but is doesn't work.

I was about to buy a SATA pcmcia card and a external box for hd but If it doesn't work ¿why should a SATA card do?

[Barry_Green]

It won't. Nothing but a genuine P2 card will work.

[Richard__Knight]

So will the CinePorter use genuine P2 card componets to connect into the HVX?

[Barry_Green]

As far as I know they've designed their own fully-compatible system, engineered specifically to work in the P2 environment.