EnTiTy
10-21-2005, 04:42 PM
Ok a first hands on with the datel 4g hardrive, with great thanks to www.darkplanets.co.uk for the sample.
so lets get on with it when first opened the package i realised that this device may be HUGE but light beyond belief in comparison to british 2 pound coin not much difference in weight, so your not going to feel as if your lugging about a brick.
As you can see the battery has it's own custom cover that fits pefectly in place of the orignal without any give just like the original, picture of cover and battey below .
http://img469.imageshack.us/img469/6163/dsc00937nk.jpg
http://img469.imageshack.us/img469/2299/dsc00920am.jpg
First thing to do before anything was to strip the thing down
and examine the inner workings of the hardrive, first impression this device was created not to be duplicated.
Datel used a military grade actel ic which is near impossible to reverse engineer, many modchip makers use this ic for that very reason it's secure
and almost impossible to extract any original code fom the ic picture below.
http://img480.imageshack.us/img480/7894/dsc00912jy.jpg
Onto the compact flash micro drive the drive is a magistore 4g i personally have used the 2.2g version for photography which was known for its problems losing data and simply failing altogether its not a solid state drive it's much like a real hdd just much smaller, it has plates and moving parts = possible problems if knocked dropped etc i dont see people planning on dropping a psp or the 4ghdd atleast i hope not.
However the 4 gig version is a different build alltogether so might not have the short comings of its little brother the 2.22g.
here is a close up of the fake memory stick with flexi cable quite secure and not much chance of doing damage to the delicate wires encased in the cable
http://img468.imageshack.us/img468/9051/dsc00958kx.jpg
finally a shot of the pcb cf and its cover sorry its bit out of focus rushed these shots had quite busy day and didnt have time to set tripod up etc
http://img458.imageshack.us/img458/6376/dsc00983sm.jpg
Putting the little chap back together it's time to test for a 1.3g movie the time taken to transfer, was 8 mins the time estimated said 14 so i decided to open the little fellow back up and go directy via a card reader to the cf much quicker at 5 min 34 sec not dramatic but enough this made me think why didnt datel make the cf card removeble so [A] you could carry more cf cards round with you and [b] for the quicker transfer rate via a card reader.
ok time for sleep mode ok this thing gets hot when you either use sleep mode or pause a game as expected this is normal and should not be problem anyway for the drive itself but maybe to the circuits below the hdd of the psp over time.
last comments its a great little device and does what it says on the tin, its not anywhere near as big and clumsy looking as it looks in the pictures it flows with the contour of the psp feels nice to hold still maybe not so good, if you have really small hands the main downside really is any current case you own you would have to remove the hdd and battery from the psp to put it away nother downside where is the white one :P
in reality it would have been better to simply have the cf convertor connected on an extendable cable so you could put the device away in your pocket, with the option to hotswap the actual cf card having multiple ammounts of cards just like you can with ms's.
EnTiTy
so lets get on with it when first opened the package i realised that this device may be HUGE but light beyond belief in comparison to british 2 pound coin not much difference in weight, so your not going to feel as if your lugging about a brick.
As you can see the battery has it's own custom cover that fits pefectly in place of the orignal without any give just like the original, picture of cover and battey below .
http://img469.imageshack.us/img469/6163/dsc00937nk.jpg
http://img469.imageshack.us/img469/2299/dsc00920am.jpg
First thing to do before anything was to strip the thing down
and examine the inner workings of the hardrive, first impression this device was created not to be duplicated.
Datel used a military grade actel ic which is near impossible to reverse engineer, many modchip makers use this ic for that very reason it's secure
and almost impossible to extract any original code fom the ic picture below.
http://img480.imageshack.us/img480/7894/dsc00912jy.jpg
Onto the compact flash micro drive the drive is a magistore 4g i personally have used the 2.2g version for photography which was known for its problems losing data and simply failing altogether its not a solid state drive it's much like a real hdd just much smaller, it has plates and moving parts = possible problems if knocked dropped etc i dont see people planning on dropping a psp or the 4ghdd atleast i hope not.
However the 4 gig version is a different build alltogether so might not have the short comings of its little brother the 2.22g.
here is a close up of the fake memory stick with flexi cable quite secure and not much chance of doing damage to the delicate wires encased in the cable
http://img468.imageshack.us/img468/9051/dsc00958kx.jpg
finally a shot of the pcb cf and its cover sorry its bit out of focus rushed these shots had quite busy day and didnt have time to set tripod up etc
http://img458.imageshack.us/img458/6376/dsc00983sm.jpg
Putting the little chap back together it's time to test for a 1.3g movie the time taken to transfer, was 8 mins the time estimated said 14 so i decided to open the little fellow back up and go directy via a card reader to the cf much quicker at 5 min 34 sec not dramatic but enough this made me think why didnt datel make the cf card removeble so [A] you could carry more cf cards round with you and [b] for the quicker transfer rate via a card reader.
ok time for sleep mode ok this thing gets hot when you either use sleep mode or pause a game as expected this is normal and should not be problem anyway for the drive itself but maybe to the circuits below the hdd of the psp over time.
last comments its a great little device and does what it says on the tin, its not anywhere near as big and clumsy looking as it looks in the pictures it flows with the contour of the psp feels nice to hold still maybe not so good, if you have really small hands the main downside really is any current case you own you would have to remove the hdd and battery from the psp to put it away nother downside where is the white one :P
in reality it would have been better to simply have the cf convertor connected on an extendable cable so you could put the device away in your pocket, with the option to hotswap the actual cf card having multiple ammounts of cards just like you can with ms's.
EnTiTy