Sounds to me like all Artos wanted was a large sized data log. I would not use a hard drive for this application. A MUCH better approach would be to utilize a compact flash card. These are very easy to interface to an embedded system. The compact flash cards have capacities of 256MB , 512 MB, and even 1 GB now. <<Incidently the interface to these solid state devices is the same as the IBM micro drive that somebody suggested in an earlier post.>>

If you use a private logging format for the data you can then easily just simply put the data in and take it back out with the 8051 in the embeded application. In this method the read back would use some method like RS232 to transfer the data to a PC for later offline analysis <<like many have suggested>>. Note that a common 256 MByte flash card, in binary format, can hold over 9 years of data that is logged at 256 bytes every 5 minutes.

Now if you can put more work into the 8051 software and put the data into the FLASH card in the file system format then the flash card can simply be unplugged from the embedded system and the card connected to a PC via a USB reader module. This would be the BEST way to get the data into the PC for analysis. The reason for this is becasue if you had a full 256 MByte card in your private format it would take about 26 hours to upload the module to the PC at 28.8K baud on a serial port or modem connection.

Mike