[luau] compact flash

[Brian Chee]

I use them on either a pcmcia adapter (cheap but fast) or a USB dongle. Both
show up as removable hard disks. Compact Flash is now available up to 1gb.

I use the IBM Microdrive (1gb) to do the same.....the Mini-ITX motherboards
I'm using for my embedded linux project also allows a boot from compact
flash....

In many cases, I like using flash more than the older "disk on chip" flash
memory standard. I get more write cycles (well more than the old disk on
chips) and a bit faster access without the special hardware necessary....any
pcmcia type II slot can use an adapter, and any USB Master port can use the
dongle.

Flash comes in MANY flavors.....I use the MultiMediaCard (aka MMC) since one
of my embedded linux platforms accomodate that flavor....but my Nikon camera
uses Compact Flash....many other cameras use either smartmedia or memory
stick....

Almost all of the different flavors of flash memory have been implemented
using a subset of the ATA disk standard....linux I believe makes pretend the
flash memory is a scsi driver and handles it that way.

/brian chee

University of Hawaii ICS Dept
Advanced Network Computing Lab
1680 East West Road, POST rm 311
Honolulu, HI  96822
808-956-5797 voice, 808-956-5175 fax

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "TB" <tburns at despammed.com>
To: "luau" <luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2003 11:26 AM
Subject: [luau] compact flash


> Hate to let my ignorance show, but what are people
> using flash cards for besides camera stuff? Is there a
> widget that makes them act like a hard drive or
> something? I've seen those USB flash "disks" like
> diskonkey, but we're talking about the plain flash
> cards used in cameras, right? What sort of interface
> is used? How much twiddling to make linux recognize
> it? Could I use it with RH9 or Mandrake out of the
> box?
>
> I googled on this, but don't understand the results.
> Maybe a pointer to a faq or newsgroup?
> Compactflash.org has a faq, but it doesn't say much
> about use in a desktop environment.
>
> thanks,
> TB
> _______________________________________________
> LUAU mailing list
> LUAU at videl.ics.hawaii.edu
> http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/luau