JVC GZ-MC200

[Miami 0]

Anyone had an opportunity to play with one of these? Any opinions about how a hard drive would hold up to the rigors of jumping?

Miami

[pope 0]

JVC:Digital Video = Huffy:Mountain Biking

[dragon2 2]

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Anyone had an opportunity to play with one of these? Any opinions about how a hard drive would hold up to the rigors of jumping?

Do a search, a microdrive cannot stand the altitude nor the movement of jumping. No harddrive can. Only solid state memory (or tapes, duh) will work.

ciel bleu,
Saskia

[Miami 0]

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JVC:Digital Video = Huffy:Mountain Biking

Well yea, thats a given...but what if Sony made something similar to this...would the hard drive be able to withstand opening shock without scratching the piss out of the disk?

And when's the next B3? The last one kicked ass!

Miami

[EricTheRed 0]

I played with one in the store. It's reall really small.

As has been stated before, hard drives do not perform at altitude. This cam takes compact flash though and I wonder how it would perform with a big, fast flash card.

It doesn't have remote connections and the controls looked like they would be tough to use in the air, but it would be a neat toy. (Just not worth my $$)

Wanna buy me one? I promise I'll give you a full report.

illegible usually

[Miami 0]

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Do a search, a microdrive cannot stand the altitude nor the movement of jumping. No harddrive can. Only solid state memory (or tapes, duh) will work.

Thats what I figured. Eventually though you would think they could come out with something similar to this that would work for us.

Miami

[Miami 0]

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I played with one in the store. It's reall really small.

What was the video quality like?

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Wanna buy me one? I promise I'll give you a full report.

Hehe, don't hold your breath...I wouldn't spend my money on a JVC for myself...

Miami

[AndyMan 7]

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What if Sony made something similar to this...would the hard drive be able to withstand opening shock without scratching the piss out of the disk?

No. Hard drives simply can not be used over 10,000 feet.

Seagate, Maxtor, Toshiba, Hitachi, and IBM are the companies involved as they're the ones who actually make the hard drives that get put into these cameras. None of them make a hard disk that works at high altitudes.

This is unlikely to change.

_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[Kris 0]

Andy's dead on with this one. I used to work for Seagate so let me expand a bit on this.

Disk drives, specifically the read/write heads, work because when the platter spins, it creates a cushion of air above it. It's known as an "air-bearing surface".

The heads float on this cushion, literally tenths of a millimeter above the surface. Now, this is some nicely thick air, so if you were to move the drive, or only submit it to a few G's (30-60G's for most desktop drives, up to 100G's for laptop/portable drives) the head is cushioned and shouldn't slap the media.

If it does slap, the head will score a groove in the substrate of the media faster than you can blink, and the head will be destroyed.

Anything above 10K feet MSL is really pushing it for drives and you really should have the drive in a specially pressurized chamber.

The higher the density (capacity), the more fragile it's gonna be.

And before anyone says that 100G's is a lot, you can generate 200G's by simply slapping your hand upon a table-top. It's duration that matters it doesn't take much to muck up a drive.

Sky, Muff Bro, Rodriguez Bro, and
Bastion of Purity and Innocence!™

[Miami 0]

Very interesting...learn something new every day.
Thanks for the info guys.

Miami

[PhreeZone 20]

I know of at least 1 company out there that is looking at making hard drives for high altitude unpressurized environments. Its going to be years before they bring a drive to market.

They are looking to target the ever expanding Asian market. Specifically they see a possible need for the dives in the western mountian region. I know mountian climbers are asking for high altitude iPods right now already

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[Spizzzarko 0]

So why does my Ipod work at 18000 MSL?

[AndyMan 7]

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So why does my Ipod work at 18000 MSL?

If you're honestly taking your Ipod to 18000 MSL and it still works, then you're damned lucky.

If you continue, you can expect to find a gradually increasing number of corrupt tracks, or a completely dead unit.

RTFM. (read the friggin manual). http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html

_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[dragon2 2]

Took my 300D and Henny's D100 up in the Hercs at World Team 2004 a couple of times. One time I forgot to switch the microdrive for a cf card. It has been at 23k for quite a while (the planes stay that high for some time, by the time we landed the jumpers were packed). But it still works. That was careless and I'm not going to do that again, and I'm DEFINATELY not jumping with the microdrive. Anyone wants a 1GB microdrive?

ciel bleu,
Saskia

[Kris 0]

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So why does my Ipod work at 18000 MSL?

You probably got real lucky and got the songs loaded into the iPod's 32MB buffer before you hopefully did any damage.

Sky, Muff Bro, Rodriguez Bro, and
Bastion of Purity and Innocence!™

[Olexa 0]

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Do a search, a microdrive cannot stand the altitude nor the movement of jumping. No harddrive can. Only solid state memory (or tapes, duh) will work.

So what's the problem? Use SanDisk Extreme III solid-state CompactFlash type I cards intead. SanDisk has 4GB (the same as CF Type II MicroDrive in Everios) and 8GB cards. As for speed, they have 20 million bytes per second sequential write speed, which is more than enough to handle Everio's 8.5 megabits per second stream.