[NTLK] More feedback on ATA card useage

From: Jon Scordia (jscordia_at_mac.com)
Date: Mon Aug 15 2005 - 14:27:47 PDT


Hi list,

There was some recent discussion about the merits of the ATA card driver, particularly in terms of speed and large cards. I've been using the driver with a variety of cards and settled for 2no 8 meg CF cards with 2x4meg partitions on each. Enough space for now. Some larger cards did indeed tend to slow reading and writing down, and this varied per card.

I've experimented with installing apps on various cards and internal memory. I've noticed that having *certain* cards mounted with apps on them, even if I'm not currently using that app, can significantly slow down the whole Newton and cause freezes. I assume that these apps take up valuable 'heap' space, but should the type of ATA card they are on make a difference?

I think I need to read the Wiki and FAQ again to better understand the difference between internal and card memory (storage)and internal memory (application space). The Psion was great. Every card's capacity was available as both.

You may recall that I kept getting an error message when installing Blueprint2 to the internal memory ('application not compatible with system' or similar). I tried the same process WITHOUT any ATA cards installed and BP2 installed and opened up fine. If I then re-mounted the ATA cards Blueprint2 still worked fine (phew), However on mounting one card, Newtsync, which previously worked from that card, now gives me that 'incompatable' message. Very strange.

Any observations welcome!

Regards

Jon

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