I have a Sharp SL-C3100 clamshell Zaurus (also known as a spitz), which has a 4GB Hitachi Microdrive in it. Although I think Microdrives are nifty, they have problems: * they use more power than NAND flash * they have higher latency * they have lower throughput * they don't have the shock resilience of a solid state device So I replaced the 4GiB Microdrive with an 8GiB NAND flash card. Issues that I ran into * all of the internal PCBs need to be separated to get at the CF slot where the microdrive is. * the linux kernel needs to be patched with the manufid, and prodid of the card, so that the new device can be used for the root filesystem (otherwise you'll get a kernel panic on boot) Here's the patch
*** linux-2.6.16/drivers/ide/legacy/ide-cs.c.orig       Thu Jan  4 21:10:30 2007
--- linux-2.6.16/drivers/ide/legacy/ide-cs.c    Thu Jan  4 21:16:59 2007
***************
*** 413,418 ****
--- 413,419 ----
  static struct pcmcia_device_id ide_ids[] = {
        PCMCIA_DEVICE_FUNC_ID(4),
        PCMCIA_DEVICE_MANF_CARD(0x0007, 0x0000),        /* Hitachi */
+       PCMCIA_DEVICE_MANF_CARD(0x000a, 0x0000),        /* Unknown */
        PCMCIA_DEVICE_MANF_CARD(0x0032, 0x0704),
        PCMCIA_DEVICE_MANF_CARD(0x0045, 0x0401),
        PCMCIA_DEVICE_MANF_CARD(0x0098, 0x0000),        /* Toshiba */