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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation

WDC 179.56

+0.7%

Dec 24 12:59 PM EST

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To: Si_Detective who wrote (10983)	5/11/2000 11:51:00 PM
From: Gary Spiers	Read Replies (1) of 60323

John, I have been using pcmcia and (more recently) CF format storage devices in a variety of portable computing products for over 5 years. I have cards in a variety of sizes as well as a Western Digital Caviar 40MB Type III pcmcia hardrive (made in 93) that may be considered a forerunner of the IBM drive. In this collection of portable storage media I have a particular 15MB flashram card that has been thoroughly abused. It has been squashed, partially bent, jammed in pockets etc. etc. The case is marked and scarred from abuse - the chips inside actually show as indentations in the case of the card yet the card still works reliably. OTOH the Type III harddrive requires kid glove treatment to prevent disk errors and has had to be reformatted many times as parts of the disk become bad. To be honest I do not use it any more it has become so unreliable. I have an unusual older laptop that has no internal harddrive but has 4 Type II pcmcia slots (or two type III slots), runs on four AA batteries and weighs 3lbs while having a full-size keyboard, VGA screen and MS Windows and Office in ROM. In this machine the WD drive eats the batteries for lunch - I have to plug it into AC to use the drive. In contrast if I populate the slots with flash memory cards I can get in excess of 8 hours operational use from a single set of batteries. Finally my palmtop computer uses 2 AA batteries and has a pcmcia Type II slot that can use CF media via an adapter. Using flash memory in the slot I can get days of computing time ( I use the device a lot) however the IBM microdrive has two problems with this machine - the drive is too thick to fit in the slot and the slot does not supply enough power for the drive (comparison of specs). From my perspective and needs there is no contest - flash is both more robust and less power hungry. Flash rules for portable devices :-) GaryS

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