For all you embedded hackers out there...

[Ask Bjørn Hansen]

On Jun 19, 2007, at 19:37, Tom Metro wrote:

> David Kramer wrote:
>> Today's item is a pair...of 4GB MicroDrive CF cards for $15
>> "Dems is Good Hackin'"
>
> Indeed. Combine that with an IDE adapter that you can pick up on  
> eBay for about $15, and you can convert any old PC into a quiet,  
> diskless machine. 4 GB is big enough to hold most modern OSs  
> without having to trim them down.
>
> But are those "MicroDrive" cards solid state or mechanical drives?  
> The latter might explain why they're going so cheap, and if that's  
> the case, I'd pay the current going rate of about $40 for the solid  
> state version.

They are mechanical.

I used to use them in my digital cameras because of the price ("340MB  
for only a few hundred dollars!" I think it was at first), but they  
do indeed - anecdotally - fail more often than flash based ones.

Good news: you should be able to write on them many more times than  
on a flash based card (which relatively easily can be worn out by  
writes).   Speaking of that: you can get "industrial" compact flash  
cards that can handle many many more write-cycles, but they are  
considerably more expensive than regular "consumer" ones - and harder  
to get.



- ask

-- 
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