Disc Access in Moving Vehicle

HI All,
My first post. Glad to meet you all. Just found this forum yesterday while I was researching ToughBook's. You are an interesting bunch. Difficult to believe that folks are actually hacking laptops. I would have thought there is not enough room inside to add anything. I thought wrong. My hats off to you.

Tomorrow I am receiving a used 800 mHz, 256 mB, 12.1 inch monitor CF-28 running XP. But first a little background. For years I have been navigating my Jeep Wrangler in the back country with a Garmin III+ GPS interfaced to an old Dell Latitude LM via the serial port using Terrain Navigator software. I typically use real-time tracking. This software, until recently, was CD based and a map CD had to be present in the optical drive. It worked well enough but was a bit (a lot) slow changing active maps. Well, two coincident things happened. My LM's optical drive quit working and I found that Terrain Navigator has a nifty upgrade.

The upgrade allows maps to be stored on the hard drive thus improving read speed dramatically. The upgrade doesn't help my LM. The rough roads did it in and parts are not available from Dell, not even batteries. I have not checked eBay. I really don't want to rescue it. It was a Windows 95 Pentium I machine. RIP! Enter my new/old CF-28.

Now for my question which is aimed at you folks who have vehicle mounted ToughBook's using real time tracking. I would appreciate advice from anybody though. Have you had reliability problems with your Toughbook hard drives in moving vehicles? Keep in mind that I drive very rough roads; sometimes no roads at all!! If this is a major problem I do have the option of continuing to use CD's. I just don't want to.

BTW, I'm very excited to get a Toughbook whose personality should match that of my Jeep. It will be used almost exclusively for running mapping software. It will be powered by an inverter so battery life is not an issue. I have other computers for the more mundane stuff like web surfing.

Thanks, Sparky

 

Actually the Toughbook is tougher than your Jeep!

I would think that you should try installing the info on your hard drive. But there are other Jeepsters around here. I'm sure they will chime in.

 

HI Toughbooks,
I have read the entire GPS thread here. It seems that no one is having any luck with the internal Panasonic GPS feature. I get the impression that those who are involved in that thread have not had enough success to actually try it in a moving vehicle.

That, plus the software being used is not mapping software such as Terrain Navigator which uses USGS topo maps; you know, the real thing. The software being referenced in the thread is not disk intensive so I feel it is not a good benchmark to measure the true durability of the disk under the conditions I will use the machine. Therefore, I am a bit skeptical of your advice which seems a bit off the hip, so to speak. It's not that I don't appreciate your input but are you being realistic for my case?

Couple that with the warning in the Panasonic CF-28 Instruction Manual concerning not using the disk drive while walking, I feel I have reason to be concerned. This is a standard warning issued by all laptop manufacturers. Is the Toughbook disk drive tougher than more normal machines? I know it is shock mounted which gives reason for hope.

There is another factor I have not mentioned. My trips often entail high elevation driving. As you must know, disk heads fly over the platter using a very tiny gap. At high elevations, the reduced air density causes the head to fly even closer. I assume this increases the odds of head to disk contact especially under vibration and physical shock; a classic disk crash. I do know that IBM Microdrives, used in digital cameras and other places, are not supposed to be operated over 10,000 feet. I am often over 12,000 feet. Because of this I dumped all my Microdrives. Is this a factor with the Toughbook drives?

Sparky

 

Toughbok hard drives are no different than any other machines most of them are either Fujitsu or Toshiba brands. What makes them special is the way they are mounted in the laptop. Ususally using flex connectors and a polymer gel surrounding the drive. This has the affect of isolating the drive from the bumps and jolts the laptop receives during use. What Panasonic has done is kinda like those egg experiments you did in grade school, you know the ones where you built a protective housing around the egg and then dropped it of a building to see if the egg survived? If you want the detailed ratings and specs you should just check the data sheets from the drive mfg website and buy the one that is most suitable for your off road needs. I would suggest buying two drives and keeping one as a backup in case you end up driving off a cliff during your travels.

 

I have a 2000 Chevy Suburban as my "take home" vehicle. It's equipped well, and I have a Dell Latitude C640 mounted on a Jotto Desk. I personally run Streets & Trips 2008 for vehicle tracking. Since I don't go offroad, I can't suggest any other software. But for my purposes, a Jotto desk mounts to the passenger seat bolts, and is completely adjustable. I highly recommend picking one up if you are going to use a laptop in your vehicle. Yes, they're pricey, but WELL worth it!

The Dell has been running for 3 years now with not a single problem. I've swapped out with my toughbook for a few months, but preferred the touchpad on the Dell than the Panasonic.

I'm also have a broadband connection in my truck that gets between 800kbs - 1.2Mbs. I upload my position every 2 or 3 minutes, so I'm able to be tracked.

 

HI Dave,
As I mentioned above, I have been doing this for years. When I started not many vehicle computer mounts were available. I finaly found one that has a heavy plastic platform for the computer mounted on a steel goose neck type pedestal which is solidly mounted to the floor. It is adjustable in all axis including height. This allows me to have the computer in operation even when there is a passinger and I can monitor progress while driving. I am very aware of space problems because the Jeep has so little.

The GPS unit is dash mounted and interfaced to the computer through a connector panel mounted under the dash. That's also where I get 12V for the inverter. This works fine for me but there may be better ways out there.

Is there no one here using Terrain Navigator? I'm surprised. It's a great package.

Sparky

 

toughbook worked great no matter how you have them mounted, i try going with mates off roading 1/2 a month, i have pieces of metal welded to hold the toughbook in place,, and never a problem with it,
i normaly have a cd playing in the toughbook and never has jumped, not even the time when we fell in the ditch,
when am off roading,camping etc, the gps works great, main reason open space, if i were using in the city i would only ever get 2/4 fixes and 85% chances of loosing signals............

 

I did get to use my toughbook in a very bumpy truck all the way from Michigan to California last week, and it worked flawlessly.

It's not the off-roading you're talking about, but it's pretty close.. We heated the front coils to lower it (Warning to anybody reading... don't do that), so it's super stiff and we felt all of the bumps. But I used my USB GPS receiver the whole way without any issues. I could pull the laptop out of my bag, pull it out of sleep, and have the position in seconds.

I would however avoid using the CD drive in bumpy situations. Even though it does lock the CD in, you may get some skips.

 

HI Modly,
I'm afraid what you are describing is not even close to the use I will the Toughbook through. In my case the computer will be powered up continously, mounted on my computer pedestal real time tracking my location based upon received GPS coordinates and continoulsly plotting the location on displayed USGS 71/2 minute topo maps. When the GPS tracks off the current displayed map, the disk is accessed to input new map information. Depending on the displayed map scale and the vehicle speed this could happen every couple of minutes. In other words the computer will be running full time on very rough roads and calling on the HDD as new data is needed.

Remember, when the computer is Asleep, Hibernating or Off the HDD heads are retracted and locked. This prevents head to platter contact. Thus, the case you described is totally different than mine where the computer is in continuous operation.

All of my past experience using this system is with my Dell Latitude LM and with map CD's installed in the CD drive. It worked well but occasionally the CD did skip which would cause Terrain Navigator to give an error message and stop real time tracking. I would then have to restart real time tracking. A hassle at best.

In fact, the CD laser lens has actually contacted the CD while the CD was spinning. I know this because several CD's have marks on them showing the contact area. This is probably what caused the drive to fail. Are you saying that the CD drive is more sensitive to vibration than the HDD? One thing is for sure true. I have to use either the HDD or the CD drive for the mapping system to work.

Now, with the software upgrade, the CD drive will not be used (not in real time) and real time map data will instead be obtained fron the HDD. This defines my concerns. Before, the HDD was not a part of the equation. Now it will be a big part. Can it survive in the very difficult conditions presented by back country roads? That's what I want to find out.

Sparky

 

I would have to wonder if you could copy the CD to a USB (or PCMCIA) flash disk and tell the computer to use the flash disk instead. My guess is that solid state memory with no moving parts would be much more robust for your application

 

HI gravatar,
You have an excellent idea. Just to show you I went to Radio Shack today and bought my first thumb drive. It's 4GB.

Not as good as a solid state disk but maybe good enough for a proof of principle. Terrain Navigator will not allow me to browse for a location to put map data. It automatically creates a folder in the Terrain Navigator folder in Program Files for map data. Thus, I cannot separate the two.

However, Terrain Navigator does let me browse for a location for the top level folder during installation. So the idea here is to install TN on the thumb drive and also place map data there (I have no choice in this). In other words I am going to try to use the thumb drive as a normal applications disk with a drive letter. Then I will run the program from the thumb drive just like a HDD. This should eliminate the HDD from the mix. I don't know about speed considering it is a USB 2.0 interface. There may be other problems that I have not accounted for.

It seems to me that it should work. However, the Tech Support guy at Maptec (TN's publisher) said it would not work but he could not tell me why. When I asked if he had any first hand knowledge he said no. So, maybe I'm the first to try the experiment. Or maybe not. Maybe it really won't work. I'll let you know.

Worse case is I will have a thumb drive which I wanted anyway.

Sparky

 

One way to find out and that is to run it and see (talking about the HD here). The military run them full time. The police run them full time. Fire Departments run them full time. While it isn't "wheeling" per say, on emergency runs things can get slammed pretty good, and they are typically not an issue. We did have one that kept rebooting when on runs, however new HD installed and it seems okay now. That's with 3 years of continual use.

I wheel, and plan on using it full time as well. Gonna run it and see.

hth's

Greg

 

Somewhat OT but the last time I went to an Allen-Bradley seminar, there was a presentation on the industrial PCs and they were talking about some of the changes they made, one being the switch from 2.5" notebook HDs back to the bigger 3.5" drives. They said that the drive platter in a notebook drive is supported by a "fluid bearing" and that they weren't designed for 24/7/365 use and were failing prematurely. He said that desktop 3.5" drives have conventional bearings (ball bearings?) and are designed for continuous use for long periods of time.

I wonder if that was true and if so, how panasonic has overcome the limitation?

 

HI All,
I plopped the thumb drive on a USB 2.0 port on my desktop machine last night, uninstalled Terrain Navigator from C: and started the experiment. The thumb drive showed up as device H:. It is FAT32 formatted from the factory. I retained FAT32 since it is less of a space hog. The rest of my machine is formatted NTFS.

BTW it is a Sandisk Cruzer Micro at 4 GB and has a retractable USB connector, a key chain loop and an access indicator. Kind of nice. Radio Shack had these on sale for $40.

As I described in the above post, I browsed to H: and installed the base level TN software. No complaints or errors. I then ran TN using the CD as the map source which is what the base level software expects. It ran fine and at the same speed as I am used to. Slow, especially when reading map info from the CD.

Then I tried to install the HDD update and ran into a problem. The update could not find TN. It does not allow browsing. So on a hunch, I thought that it wanted to find TN in a Program Files folder like it would find on a normal C: drive installation. I created a Program Files folder on H: and moved TN into it. That did the trick. The software updated without further problems. I had to change the desktop shortcut.

I now saw the upgraded features in TN including the new Copy CD to Disk command. Things were looking good! I copied the CD map data to H:, held my breath, and ran TN. It worked!!

Pause. Danced around the computer room wildly waving arms. Reported my success to my Parrot. He approved with a squawk (he is used to my antics and is an understanding computer bird). Recovered my technical senses. Continued.

Testing revealed the map update speed to be very fast. Not much different than when I was using the HDD.

All of this means that TN can be installed and will run off a thumb drive, it will store and read map data from the thumb drive and the speed is more than acceptable, in fact great.

I think this experiment is a success. I still need to do the install on the Thoughbook and check out real time tracking but, at this point, I don't anticipate problems. Both my desk top machine and the CF-29 run Windows XP Pro (yes, CF-29; see my new thread about the used CF-28 that started this thread). But you know how computers are............... TN has many features that I have not tested but I don’t think any of them will object to the thumb drive.

I will report back after the Toughbook install and testing real time tracking in a moving Jeep.

Thanks gravitar. Your idea sparked all of this good news.

Sparky

 

Glad it worked out! It's got to be all the more satisfying considering that the author's own tech support didn't even think it would work!

 

HI gravitar,
Yes, it was satisfying. I called Maptec to inform them of the situation. I couldn't resist.

My new/used CF-29 came today. I must say that it is beautiful. It does not look used. Once I determined that the machine was basically working I started the Terrain Navigator installation on a blank thumb drive. The installation takes a while but I finally got everything in with one map CD.

TN worked like a charm. Next, I took it out to the Jeep and did a very informal mount so I could hook up to the GPS. Once in I enabled real time tracking and everything worked. When driving off the displayed map area is when the computer grabs the next chunk of map data. Happens every two or so miles. This is when the CD based system would slow down to redraw the display. Now, with the map stored on the thumb drive, the redraw is nearly instantanious. This scheme is going to work very well.

I love this computer. The touch screen takes some getting used to and at first I thought I would not use it much. But as the day went by, I got more used to it and now think I will use it a lot. The 13 inch display is excellent-much better than I expected. I now understand why you folks are so enthusiastic. So am I.

Thanks for your ideas and help.

Sparky

 

what speed is the thumb drive????
did you notice much gain in speed?????????

 

HI, DJACID,
I'm not sure which comparison you are asking about. Before getting into that let me say that I don't know the speed of the thumb drive. If thumb drives are the same as camera Compact Flash memory, the only way to be sure is to test as has been done by some photography tech sites. Above I identified the thumb drive I am using.

There are 4 speed comparisons. I defined them above. I guess it would be good to summarize.

Case 1: Terrain Navigator on hard disk and the map info read from the CD drive. This is the base level case which is the as delivered configuration. Slow for redrawing the maps on the screen.

Case 2: Terrain Navigator on hard disk and the CD's also stored on hard disk. This is the fastest case. Lightning fast. Redraw occurs in the blink of an eye.

Case 3: Terrain Navigator on the thumb drive reading map info from the CD drive. This is the equivalent to Case 1 but using the thumb drive rather than the hard disk for Terrain Navigator. Speed about the same as Case 1. This is because the CD read speed dominates both cases.

Case 4: Terrain Navigator and maps both stored on the thumb drive. This is the equivalent to Case 2 but using the thumb drive rather than the hard disk. Speed is almost as fast as Case 2. Perceptually, the redraw speed is so fast that you don't notice it. This is excellent performance. And remember, the HDD is totally out of the equation for this case.

In addition to the good news with Terrain Navigator, I learned that a thumb drive can be treated just like a normal disk. This is pretty neat and may have use beyond maps. Slick!!!

Sparky