I just bought a *4 Gigabyte * compact flash card. £180.
When It arrives I will have a device with a 400MHz processor, 4 gigabtes of storage, able to connect directly to the internet at broadband speed , that fits in the palm of my hand.
Isn’t technology great.
Hey** Lobsang** whre did you get that from ? Dabs - Scan maybe? Could use one of those.
As you’re offshore same as me in terms of P&P fingers crossed it was mail order?
I still can’t believe it. There must be a catch.
Seriously. If anyone can point out the stupid error I must have made I would be glad to know.
180 pounds is like $200 American, right? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Memory cards on ebay tend to go for around 10-15-25 bucks per 64 megs, so you’re paying $200 for 62.5 sets of 64 megs. 200/62.5=$3.20 per 64 megs. Quite cheap, probably because you’re effectively buying in bulk, and because the description sounds somewhat crackpottish in parts, and that really puts a lot of people off. Also, only bidders in the UK and North America can bid, and that also probably drives the price down.
I may well be wrong, but it doesn’t look like you’ve bought it, since bidding on it is still an option. What specifically did you do?
No, I found a link to a similar item. Not the actuall one I bought
The one I bought had a less crackpotish description, but it was the same item and same price.
£180 is $330 which may not sound cheap. But computer parts tend to be a rip off in britain anyway and before today I thought 1GB was about £250. suddenly I find 4 times the memory for 2 thirds the cost I am having a hard time believing it.
Right, after going to a conversion site, I learned that 180 UK pounds is $330 dollars American. Also, bidding was never an option, but buy it now is still, I think. 330/62.5 sets=$5.28 for 64 megs, which is a pretty darn good price. Another thing I just noticed is that this is for a digital camera memory card. I’m pretty sure a 54336 mm card won’t fit in my Palm, so there’s the PDA crowd gone there.
In other words, Lobsang, there are several mitigating factors, but you got a darned good deal.
Bidding was an option. But I prefer to buy now in most cases. The auction price was pretty close to the buy now price anyway.
Huh? Compact Flash cards are a standard size. My PDA and I’d imagine most others will take it. I already have a 512MB in my PDA at the moment.
I think that catch is that it is a MicroDrive. This means that it is not 4 GB of flash memory - it is a tiny hard drive. The major downside of this is that it will take a LOT more battery power than memory - depending on how you use it this could be an issue.
The Microdrive should work fine. You got a pretty good deal. Round here the 2 gig Hitachi Microdrives sell for around $300, and the 4 giggers for $450-$500. (New)
Incidentally, I just found this out, but there is an 8 gig Compact Flash (not Microdrive) card out there … for the low, low price of $4,000. A 4 gig Flash will set you back just over a grand.
I like the Microdrives, and they do work quite fine, but since they are not solid state (containing moving parts) they are more prone to wear and tear than Compact Flash cards. The CF cards are supposed to be far more reliable, but I personally haven’t heard of anyone losing any on their Microdrives, although, from perusing the Internet, it seems it does happen.
I’ve always wondered what will happen when we get flash cards that can take an entire operaing system.
Must be possible to make one bootable.
The only thing that worries me slightly is that MS might then be able to sell them fully installed and write protected.
There are already OSes that can fit on a memory stick. One example is Featherlinux, which supposedly can start from a USB pendrive. I’ve verified that it can actually boot from a CD using less than 64 Mb on the CD.
Of course, the older OSes like DOS will also fit on a memory stick, but they probably won’t recognize most of the modern hardware.
I plan to put the card in my PDA and leave it there indefinately. Occasionally putting it in my camera if I am going on holiday and therefore can’t offload pictures from the card for a long period.
I already have a 512MB CF card which I will leave in the camera (it’s currently serving as the PDA’s storage).
As you may gather I am pretty careful with both my PDA and my camera. I will be even more careful with the 4GB drive in one of them, all the time being conscious of a reading head on the end of an arm very very very close to the disc inside the microdrive.
A few questions…
Is the high power drain an issue when the device containing the card is switched off?
Does the drive park when the device is turned off?
According to this site it’s about $329!
The other catch is that hard drive almost certainly has a voided warranty. These drives come out of a Creative Labs Muvo MP3 player which can be purchased for about $200 US. Buying the same bare drive is about $500. Cracking the Muvo voids the warranty on the player and the drive but is worth it for those willing to take a calculated risk.
This has been the hot topic in digital photography circles as the compact flash form factor is the dominant one for professional cameras. I’ve been using a 1gb IBM branded (they are all made by Hitachi) microdrive for a few years. Because I shoot a Nikon D100 and virtually always in uncompressed NEF raw format instead of JPG I get only 107 shots on a gigabyte of storage.
In my experience with a Dimage 7 and the D100 microdrives have not bad power consumption compared to solid state memory. It’s worse but not nearly as bad as some make it out to be. Durability has been a non-issue as it’s mainly in the camera which I don’t bang around thouh I have had it out often and even dropped it on the flooor.