* Chris Browder <jb1463@earthlink.net> on Sat, 22 Apr 2000
| Assuming someone wrote an ATA flash driver [I'm sure it IS possible] --
| then we could use Compact flash or even SmartMedia cards in our Newtons,
| correct?
Well, no. Whenver you see ATA or Compact Flash or SmartMedia, substitute
"IDE disk drive". They are exactly the same thing, even though there are
no moving parts in a "solid state disk". An ATA disk driver alone will not
magically grant Newton the ability to handle the Microsoft FAT filesystem
that is commonly used on ATA disks. Getting Newton to be able to use ATA
disks as disks would require significant reworking of the OS internals.
The better solution from Newton's side would be to devise a flash
translation layer so that the ATA disks looks like RAM, rather than disk,
sort of like a big swap file that spans the entire disk. Of course,
nothing but another Newton device would be able to use it.
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