🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug19.133302.3243@crd.ge.com> davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <1992Aug17.102539.8782@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au>, rda758g@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au (A.J. Kleinert) writes:
>| The "new" intel flash cards were one of the features of a local computer
>| show here recently ... one of the Sales guys advised me that they
>| weren't actually for sale yet, but when they will be around
>| the US$800.00 mark for a 20 Mb card.  Isn't this is a little expensive for
>| a solid state device?  Were 3.5 inch floppy disks anything like this price
>| when they first came out?
>
>  20MB hard drives were more than that when they came out. Are you

Yes, and even $800 for 20MB of solid state memory in the space of four
or so stacked credit cards is *very* cheap.  Right now the cheapest 2MB
SRAM PCMCIA card is nearly $700.  I'd much rather pay $800 and have it
fit in one slot rather than $7000 and have to juggle cards.

>They also don't take in air to float the heads, since clean air is often
>not availbale in industrial situations.

In addition, although the Kittyhawk is very durable for a hard drive
(100g operating shocks) a solid state device could probably take
several times that.  Flash EPROM devices take much less power to run,
have very fast consistant read access times, and are immune to magnetic
fields.  I'm not sure, but I think a Kitthawk drive needs at least a
Type III PCMCIA cavity (10mm), while a 20MB Flash card will probably
fit in a Type II (5mm) and maybe even a Type I cavity (3.3mm).  None of
the current palmtop computers have Type III cavities.  Of course, no
current palmtop has an EPROM programmer either, so Flash cards are read
only devices in them.

>  Unless the figure for number of writes has improved I don't think I
>want to use it for a general purpose hard drive, for sure.

The preliminary Intel 4MB Flash card data sheet gives a Erase/Write
MTBF of 10^6 hours.  I don't know what this means, it might mean
failure after 114 years of continuous read/write cycles.

The Microsoft Flash File System is supposed to fix some of the problems
with writes.  One is that it takes seconds to erase a sector, where a
sector might be 256KB or more.

>| Any comments on these pricing policies?

I think it's reasonable.  If you don't like them, check out SunDisk,
they've supposedly had 20MB Flash cards for a year or so.  There are
now perhaps a dozen companies making PCMCIA memory.  Competition
will make prices drop.
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<-:(= Anthony Stieber	anthony@csd4.csd.uwm.edu   uwm!uwmcsd4!anthony