Anybody here know these things? You can get one that turns up to three cards into a mini-IDE (laptop) compatible drive for under $10 USD. Got a P3 laptop I use for reading, and the drive is about the only noise it makes.
Some brief web skimming seems to indicate the SD cards throughput being in the 10M/sec range or a little under. Any reason not to get one?
George
PS- FWIW, I’d be running 98SE (w/98Lite).
I was very interested in it myself some time ago because of its size and the fact there is no moving parts, but cannot find it locally. I also wanted to run 98Lite as you. 
Important warning.
Only do this if you can make your system run without a swap file (virtual memory). Any flash memory has a write limit, (the number of times a cell can be re-wrtitten). For normal files this is unlikely to be exceeded, for the swap file, writing many times an hour, this can soon hit the limit on most written cells. As an example, a friend set up a smoothwall firewall using compact flash. The card failed in about a month. Newer flash may have more cycles available, but until it get into the millions, a swap file will still wear it out.
Mike
Mike,
Thanks for the tip. Sad to hear that about the flash life. I checked that laptop tonight, and for some unknown reason, it’s got 160 Megs in it. 
I think I stuck a piece from a Mac laptop in it that I wasn’t using (dead power supply). I’m guessing with that much, under 98Lite, I could shut off VM unless something starts a leak somewhere. ;D
Sasha- The carrier (adapter) is the cheap part, so I may order one tomorrow just to have it. There’s a 512M SD card in a camera here that I can test it with. If it seems to work and be accessible like a regular IDE, I can track down a decent size card or two later. I’ll try to let you know here if I get it going.
George
Another point.
Compact flash is the best if you can get it. The adapters need no drivers, (a CF card looks like an IDE drive to the PC), and because it is an ATAPI 16 bit interface, it’s quite fast. MMC and SD both use a ‘short’ serial type interface and are much much slower. THis is why all the pro cameras still use CF. I can get a brand new CF <=> PCMCIA adapter here in the UK for £5.16. If you have a supply problem I’d be glad to help. The same people do the older slower (x66 speed) 1 Gigabyte CF cards for £7.04, and the latest 4Gigabyte fast (x 133 speed) cards for £35.24.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Products.ASP?CatID=13&Category=Flash+Memory&Thumbnails=yes
I’ve just been given a Vaio P3 with busted panel hinges and no hard disc. Somewhere I’ve got a PCMCIA SCSI card, so it might get recycled as a rackmount to run the edit software for the Akai S3000xl I just grabbed off Ebay - the guy was local and I got it for £97, and no carriage costs. I wonder if I can run that off a CF?
Mike
www.mini-itx.com/store has CompactFlash I / II to SATA, 40pin IDE and 44pin laptop-style IDE convertors. As TheProf said, CF’s a better bet than SD due to its much quicker r/w speeds and total IDE compatibility.
Looks like I’m a little off the spec curve here.
Transcend http://www.transcendusa.com/ are offering ‘industrial grade’ Compact Flash with 2,000,000 program/erase cycles, so a swap file might not be that bad here. they also support so-called ‘wear levelling’ algorithms, but that might mean a special driver. If I was really keen, I’d be looking at the linux world for that.
One other thought I’ve had is to use 2 drives, one dedicated as a swap drive, (easier in Linux), I’ve done this for a photographer’s machine, dedicating a Western Digital ‘Raptor’ series SATA drive as the Photoshop swap disc. That way, if the swap drive dies, it’s not the end of all your other data, it might even be possible to do some logging, (not too hard with the Linux journalling files systems, harder under Windows), and do a precautionary replacement at the life point. Or wait until you get swap file error and replce it at that point. If it improves the way it has been doing, the second one might be the last one you buy.
HTH
Mike
Mike (or anyone)–
I’m finally getting back on this and should have an adapter showing up maybe this week. I got a faster newer laptop and haven’t been spending much time on the P3 I wanted the flash for. Unfortunately, the 40 pin full-sized adapters seemed to account for most of the neat looking ones I saw. I ended up with a single CF card laptop drive adapter.
The choices of card on the other hand were sort of overwhelming. There are even ones which appear to have moving parts (“microdrive” or something). Is there anything in particular that I *don’t* want in the CF card? I could probably get by with 2G, but 4 would be safer. They look to be in the $35-50 (USD) range for a 4, and SanDisk seems pretty common. I don’t think it’s worth a whole lot of money for what I’m doing on it, and I may actually be able to turn off VM on this machine as well.
Thanks Again,
George
A microdrive is is a tiny hard disc, originally made for photographers, and used in some iPods. I’ve been told by a photographer that the iPod drives are lower spec’d than the photography ones, with regard to read/write speeds, and that some unscrupulous sellers were selling them on ebay to unsuspecting camera owners. They have been largely replaced by flash memory, though there is the promise of a new generation with 40G capacities. they were originally built by IBM and HP, though HP seemed to lose interest, (theirs were assembled by seiko Epson), and IBM sold their disc operations to Hitachi, possibly following the ‘DeathStar’ fiasco.
A normal ‘card’ is flash memory. The speed is useful - they go up to 133x original flash speed, whtever that was.
If you can run without VM, even better.
Mike
Thanks again Mike!
I think I’ll just go with whatever deal I can find on the regular one. Interesting to know what’s in an iPod too!
George (that adapter hasn’t shown up yet BTW)
PS- I was a DeathStar owner too (nice name ;D). Mine went within a few months. I thought Apple was doing me a favor by slipping the nice 7200rpm IBM into an “end-of-life” Mac line which was supposed to ship with a 5400. >:(
Can you believe that I was one of the lucky ones who’s DeathStar (LMAO at that one Mike!) actually survived, and what’s more, still survives to this day.
Yeah, I think that came up in that thread about reliable HDs. I’ve got one that I dragged around in a bag for years and it still works. I think you have to get an exact batch or run number to figure out what breaks and what doesn’t, but that of course is only after a whole bunch of them have broken and word has gotten around. 8)
It seems to be a wierd matter of luck: I’ve got 2 30G Deskstars, (being polite in case they have audio pickup), which are fine.
Sitting here in a sulk, complete with legendary ‘click of death’, is an 80G belonging to my photographer friend. It contains amongst other things, the entire session that produced my profile pic. This is probably the best incentive I have for learning how to fix one: it simply isn’t worth the £1500+ we’ve been quoted for an attempt at retrieval. Main problem is sorting out the fact from the fiction in the cause of the effect - as a google search will prove. I had a 60G that had a rough trip from France in a PowerPC, it keeled over after about 6 months use, though I can’t wholly blame IBM for that. I stripped it, and can confirm no loose heads, so that’s one cause dismissed. Best guesses so far seem to revolve around a temp sensor, and/or a mismatch between the drive data and some info cached on flash memory in the drive. I wish I’d kept it to compare with the 80G.
By the way. If you have an early deskstar, there is a piece of software from IBM that will check if it needs a firmware upgrade, which you can do yourself. Both the 30G’s have had the mod.
If you’re still interested, the actual flash card showed up today (the adapter’s been here for a few) and it’s in the 98Lite laptop now. I ran into every little crap problem I could, from forgetting to take a boot disk with me, to finding out that the adapter had ALL the pins (whereas the laptop IDE’s are missing that one in the center). I had to drill out the female socket in the hard drive caddy where the covered hole is with a big clunky power drill (no electronics/Dremel stuff on site).
The computer sees it just fine, and I was able to FDISK and partition it OK, but certain operations seem way too slow for some of the speed specs I’ve seen. I didn’t have a 98 version of HDTach or anything there either, so I’ll look into that tomorrow night to make sure it really is slow. I’ve also still got to turn off the VM.
If Mike’s here-- Was there anything special to do as far as formatting? I noticed when it was in a USB card reader under XP, the disk management panel had options for block size or something. XP also doesn’t seem to be able to access the logical partition on it, but that’s me just be because of the card reader or something.
Take Care,
George (damn glad to have that noisy HD out of there BTW 8))
That`s cool! So, did you disabled swap file?
No, I’ll do that tomorrow, but if it’s ridiculously slow, it may not be so cool. 
I’ll let you know what it does.
George
Not sure about the speed problem, but “The Cosmic Supply Company”, (Motto “We promise to deliver anything at anytime”), has just delivered me a battered Sony Vaio Laptop, with broken hinges and no hard disc, (but the carrier is there). Looks like I might be trying this one myself, I want a rack mounted PC for editing on my Akai 3000XL, (with my eyesight the little Akai screen is worse than a gameboy). I’ll try it in a week or so, and let you know. I need to order the adapter.
I’ve got a couple of 1G cards, to try with and somewhere a laptop SCSI card, so the Sony is the first up for audition. The Akai editor only runs under 95/98 anyway. Adding a mini keyboard and probably a trackball and the possibilities seems reasonable.
Anyone any comments on using MESA II by the way?
Mike
Anyone any comments on using MESA II by the way?
Ahh MESA. possibly the crappest editor ever. What you want is millennium.
http://www.chickensys.com/products/millennium/details.php?sw_name=Millennium
Now I have a license for it but stuffed if I can find the media!
The guy literally had thousands of positives on eBay for the SanDisk cards and the labeling and all is perfect. Didn’t realize it was such an “organized” business. Looking at SanDisk’s site, where you can purchase cards directly, a 4G is in the 90 dollar range or something, so I guess $39.95 should have been a good clue. ;D
On the other hand, the HDTach results did indeed suck, and I’m not sure how much of it a counterfeit card would be responsible for. I need to look into what the exact throughput specs are for these things if used with direct-to-IDE adapters, but it may not be much higher than what I got. It looks like SD’s site may mention 10MB/s for a “sequential” read speed (http://tinyurl.com/2r9h5u).
Here are some of the figures (CPU utilization bothers me the most):
CF Card in 2.5" IDE carrier (identified as generic IDE disk type 55)
Random Access Time = .7mS (the only good figure)
Read Burst Speed = 1.7MB/s
Read Speed = 2.4 MB/s-Max, 2.4MB/s-Min, 2.0MB/s-Average
CPU utilization = 93.7%
Original 6GB IDE drive (also shows as generic type 55)
Random Access Time = 21.2ms
Read Burst Speed = 31 MB/s
Read Speed = 14.1MB/s-Max, 7.8MB/s-Min, 11.0MB/s-Average
CPU utilization = 2.1%
In a USB2.0 card reader under XP, I can get this:
Random Access Time = .9ms
Read Burst Speed = 5.1MB/s
Read Speed = 5.2MB/s-Max, 5.1MB/s-Min, 5.0MB/s-Average
CPU utilization = 6.1%
* I can’t, however, see the larger logical “D” partition on the USB reader
Not sure what I’ll do. I wish I could track down a different CF card locally and see if it does any better, but it’s definitely not worth 90 dollars for a real 4G (the laptop only cost me 60). I may either keep the card and deal with the crappy speed in the 98Lite laptop, or get a cheap USB card reader and use it as a flash stick.
George (seller BTW is edepotxpress on eBay, but I think most bulk CF dealers on there are probably BS ;D)
Report it to SanDisk. They will supply you with a real-deal CF card as a thankyou for helping them to bust someone stealing from them.
It’s fortunate that sandisk realised that such a measure costs them almost nothing and makes them a lot, while being perfect for the buyer too