Ever since I got dynamips, the cisco router emulator to actually run code compiled by GCC, I wanted to do something more fun than a simple game of planetfall with a memory mapped file.  And to make a router more like a real computer, I’d want some kind of disk.  Now most cisco routers have PCMCIA slots, so remembering back in the day iomega sold the click! drive, a 40MB removable disk cartridge that has a PCMCIA interface!  Neat!

And even better, on eBay I managed to fine one.  And much to my surprise when it arrived it was NIB, from 1999!

As you can see, there isn’t much inside that box, a CD-ROM of the manual, a brief leaflet, and of course the drive itself and a single 40MB clik! cartridge.  I have to say that it’s all pretty neat.

The disk itself is pretty small.  It does remind me of the older minicomputer disk packs with a removable sleeve to protect the media, but like a three and half inch floppy it is spring loaded to keep users away from it.

The disk gently slides into the drive, to give a very satisfying ‘click’ sound to it.

Unfortunately for me, since this was one of those late night impulse purchases I should have remembered that the cisco 1701 series of routers does NOT have a PCMCIA slot, and the NPE-G1 on my cisco 7200 VXR, instead has a compact flash adapter, not the full PCMCIA.

OOPS.

While I do have a RSP 4+ with the PCMCIA slots, I don’t have a chassis or power supply so I can’t do anything with it anyways.  Unless I find the pinouts, and make my own harness to power it up, which I guess is always possible.

So close, but it went nowhere.  But I thought it was interesting enough to take a look at such a tiny storage solution from the turn of the 21st century.