PC-card question

[Marc Sira]

> I'm curious to see if anyone has experience w/ those CompactFlash RAM
> adapters for the PC-card slot.  Do they work w/o having to get the CardBus
> upgrade?  I'm thinking about two things.  First, just using a big card for
> VM space or as a "RAMdisk", to save on batteries.  Second, I'm hoping to
> then get a digital camera that uses CF cards and be able to transfer the
> pics w/o having to spend the $99 on the upgrade.  Thanks.

A Compact Flash card really is just a PCMCIA storage card in a smaller
package (it appears as an ATA drive). This is why the CF adaptor for PC card
slots is so cheap relative to the Smartmedia or multiformat adaptors - the
former is really just an inert wire adaptor, while the latter have to have
some smarts. On the other hand the CF media itself is usually a bit more
expensive (and bulky) than Smartmedia, and doesn't have the potential
security features of SD/MMC. Six of one, half-dozen of the other. ;)

They work as well in the stock 2400 as anywhere else. As noted, they're
pretty slow, and the nature of flash memory also makes them poorly suited
to VM storage or any other application that involves a lot of writes (the
memory cells are only good for so many rewrites, and the number is
surprisingly low). You can use it for general storage as long as your
planned application involves relatively little writing - the ideal is more
or less the way a camera uses it (writing large files sporadically). Using
it to spin down the hard drive (to save battery power) would probably exceed
that goal, and you might be better advised to stick to a RAM disk in main
memory. Unfortunately even using the flash card as a boot disk involves a
fair amount of small writes, probably wearing it out quickly.

The speed when reading is as good as or faster than retrieving pictures
through a USB link to a camera, of course, and in many cases it's more
convenient to read the card directly.

-- 
Marc Sira		|	toh at victoria.tc.ca
If you can't play with words, what good are they?