On 2003-02-17 bsieker@freenet.de wrote:

> Btw, according to the specs average CF cards do not use significantly
> less power than MicroDrives. IMHO the main point for CompactFlash
> over MicroDrive is the CF's mechanical robustness. MD is quite
> robust, as far as hard disks go (and, iirc, has a gravity sensor
> that immediately parks the disk in free-fall to prevent damage from
> the following impact.  Does that mean MDs don't work in orbit?) but
> nothing beats CF with no mechanical parts.

  Actually, MDs (and PCMCIA hard drives) are not very reliable at all.  I
lost a Toshiba PCMCIA HD (and it took them four months to service the
warranty).  Check the camera review web sites for more evidence of a
substantial failure rate.  However, the MD failures seem to have no
relationship to use.  CF is much more reliable and takes less power, but
suffers from write limitations.

> On both types it is certainly a good idea to mount filesystem with
> options "noatime, nodevmtime". to prevent frequent (write) accesses to
> the disk, even if it's otherwise idle or only read.

  With this and no swap on a non-server machine, write limitations should
have no significant effect.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@city-net.com