[NTLK] Newton Compact Flash - Battery Life, Alternative storage methods?

Gavin Watson gavin83209 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 4 19:30:18 EDT 2012


A couple of years ago, I bought a 266x 8 GB CF card with the intention 
of using it in my Newton, but it was painfully slow. After a bit of 
research, I traded the 8 GB card for the 50x 512 MB card in a friend's 
camera. The 512 MB card is probably ten times faster and more stable in 
my MP2100 and I still don't even have 30 MB of data on the card. It 
still isn't quite as fast as linear flash, but it's at least comparable. 
If you can find one, try a CF card in the 128-512 MB range and see if it 
helps.

For battery life, there is an option in ATA Support Preferences to put 
the card to sleep after a certain delay. Try 10 seconds or something 
similar if you aren't already. Unlike MicroDrives, CF cards don't have 
any moving parts, so they take almost no time to come out of sleep mode.

On 07/04/2012 06:29 AM, William Maloney wrote:
> Hey, running a SanDisk Ultra CompactFlash card running at 30MB/s and with a
> total storage of 4GB. I bought this for $20 at Best Buy as an alternative
> to my IBM MicroDrive with Guyot's ATA Driver. Unfortunately, the CF card is
> almost as slow as the MicroDrive and takes up nearly as much battery. Is
> there a way to reduce the amount of power this thing eats up? I don't think
> the adapter plays much role, but it is also a stock "PC Card adapter for
> IBM MicroDrives". Also, does anyone know of any other storage methods that
> are efficient and quick to use? Standard flash cards are just too small and
> like to be able to use one card if possible.



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