>BTW, I CompactFlash (aka Digital film) on the PC. The driver on the PC
>does not require a reboot when changing CompactFlash cards. It senses
>when a new one is put in or one is taken out. I'm using a little USB-based
>adapter called Jump Shot made by Lexar (same folks that make the
>CompactFlash cards). The CompactFlash card is viewable from inside "My
>Computer" but it does not have a drive letter assigned to it.
This is because the Jumpshot is essentially an USB adapter cable. ONLY
Lexar Media cards can use it, because these cards actually have USB built
in - and this technology is a Lexar patent. The Jumpshot is nothing more
than a piece of cable connecting the proper pins on the card to the USB
port. As USB is hot-pluggable, and the card has on-board USB, hot plugging
is not a problem - but, as I said, ONLY for Lexar cards. Other cards do NOT
have this feature.
CF cards can be hot-pluggable, the required hardware is practically
trivial. The real problem with CF hot-plugging is that most adaptors use
the CF as a standard IDE drive, so it is the software that ultimately
prevents hot-plugging, because the existence and size of the hard drives
are only checked at system bootup time. It does not expect the whole drive
to be removed, and a new one, possibly of different size, to be connected!
Note that removable media such as Syquest, ZIP, LS120 is different in this
respect. When there is no media, these still look like a hard drive to the
computer, but return a 'no media' error. With a CF, when it is removed,
there is nothing to return errors, because there is nothing there at all.
In some cases there are other problems, such as removing a CF card that was
a master drive with a slave attached.
>I'm guessing the Adapter that Peter is using makes the CompactFlash look
>just like a HD or floppy.
Every CF card MUST have IDE compatibility mode to be considered fully CF
compliant. The card is made to act as a standard IDE drive by connecting
one single pin to ground (IIRC). All that is really needed from that point
on, is a way to wire the 50-pin CF conector to a standard IDE and power
supply cable.
This however does not mean that all CF cards will work in the IDE mode.
Some are not fully compliant, mostly older and smaller capacity cards, or
cards that use the same form factor but are proprietary and bear the same
name as the digital camera or PDA they belong to. General purpose CF cards
should be fine.
IBM makes tiny 1" hard drives that generally fit the CF card form factor,
but are slightly thicker. This is known as CF Type II. These drives (called
Microdrive - immagine that! :-) ) should also work with an appropriate
adaptor, and currently come in 4 sizes, from 160Mb to 1Gb.
Nasta
