CompactFlash

[bruce leeroy]

Smart Media cards
Secure Digital Cards
MultiMedia Cards

alll suck


why? because you're limited to 128MEGABYTES, maybe 256 in some cases.

compact flash goes all the way to around 3GBytes. Yes I know it writes slower, Yes, I know the ARM 9 natively supports SMC's so it would need a data translator, making READs much slower, but 128MB sucks for a personal digital device--512MB-1GB is more like it---it would also allow many different OS's (mainly LINUX distros) to run on this system.

There's not software fix for this, a translator is a hardware change--perhaps for the GPi I've heard so little about.

Whatever happened to it?

 

[Axeman]

Yes I know it writes slower,

As far as I know - it doesn't...

I have a camera that will write both, and CF is faster on that. Also, is read faster in my card reader. No special type of CF or anything, just normal, bog standard stuff...

 

[jjthe2]

512MB SD cards have been available for a few months, with 1GB out by fall. Sizes are projected to the 10's of GBs. You can also get 1GB memory sticks right now, and both do have faster transfers speeds (depending on the card and controller).

Also they're much smaller than compactflash, and thus automatically cooler.

What sucks is that gamepark chose what is essentially the only flash memory card on the market that is no longer in development.

 

[Chip]

<snip> Yes I know it writes slower, Yes, I know the ARM 9 natively supports SMC's so it would need a data translator, making READs much slower, <snip>

I'd seen this posted before, and it didn't seem right. SMC used a serial interface, and CF uses parallel. I went and looked it up and here's what I found:

SMC - max transfer rate is 3.5 megabytes / sec.
CF - max transfer rate is 8 megabytes / sec. (5-7 MB/s sustained)
CF 2.0 - max transfer rate is 16 megabytes / sec.

I got SMC and CF numbers from the Kingston Memory and CompactFlash Association websites.

Now, after converting from parallel to serial the speed increase might not be quite as dramatic, but CF certainly wouldn't be SLOWER than SMC.

 

[Mofokubik]

There is nothing wrong with flash cards. Nothing wrong with a limit of 128mb per card. Just because there are other things that are better doesnt mean that what we have isnt good enough. When I want more memory I will buy more cards...

 

[pubjoe]

no longer in development = cheap cards

 

[wilek]

What sucks is that gamepark chose what is essentially the only flash memory card on the market that is no longer in development.

Uh oh. I'd better pick up that 2nd one I've been considering then, while I still can. h34r:

 

[kraahl]

"Not in development" is not the same thing as "not in production"

 

[Rico]

pubjoe hit it on the head, the GP32 is pretty cheap considering its power. Part of the reason is the shoddy manufacture (heh) and relatively cheap parts.

 

[admin]

test7