If you don't need very much storage or want extreme durability using a flash-ram-card meight by your way to go.

• no mechanical parts ;)
• SanDisk? will have a 1GB module ready for anout 700 USD
• very small cards are very cheap and can thus be a good starting-point if you want to switch to a MicroDrive? later but save money now.
• very low power-draw
• much less bandwidth compare with a microdrive but dues to no seek times this hardly often matters
• every cell can only be written to 250000-1000000 times, thus(and because normal file-systems try to minimize seek-times) you will want to use a special file-system like JFFS2 that distribute writes more evenly across the card
• you will want to have /tmp, /var/log, /var/tmp, /var/spool and /var/run to use a ram-disk to not exceed this write-limit too soon.
• With anything but Linux you meight run into problems using no-name cards. E.g. the Hitachi WIA did not recognize a Hama 32MB CF-card for me. If you have such problems, try to exchange the card for a SanDisk? -card. most shops know about such problems and will let you do so (as SanDisk? are a few euro(but not much) more expensive) and you cannot possibly have damaged the original card.

See also:

Interfacing with PIC microcontrollers

CompachFlash specification

IDE->CF shematics

-- MarcusWolschon - 31 Mar 2002