[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: 128 or 512?

[Joel Ewy]

paulh96636 at aol.com wrote:
> I'm still curious to find out about the possibility of using IBM's MicroDrive (now by Hitachi)...  Wouldn't this
> drive overcome the write problems of CF devices?     -ph 
>   
You wouldn't have the limited write cycles of flash memory, but you
would still have the issue that the compact flash interface isn't really
a memory bus interface, but rather a(n IDE) hard disk interface.  And
while MicroDrives are nice and small like CF cards, they aren't solid
state devices, so you get back into the realm of moving parts, including
read/write head assemblies that have to move around all over the place. 
While I don't know that much about MicroDrives in specific, I do know
that with hard drives in general, moving the heads from track to track
takes place on the order of milliseconds or tens of milliseconds, as
contrasted with tens to hundreds of nanosecond access times for DRAM. 
So if you're trying to use a MicroDrive for main memory in a CoCo,
you're going to end up with a very, very slow CoCo.  At those speeds,
the sun will have consumed all its nuclear fuel before you ran up
against the write limitations of flash memory.  :)

But a MicroDrive would make a nice little hard disk for a CoCo.

JCE

>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: deek at d2dc.net
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Sent: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 2:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] [Color Computer] Re: 128 or 512?
>
>
> Jim Cox wrote:
>   
>> Why James?  Would the issue be the limited writes of the 
>> flash cards?
>>     
>
> Compact Flash is a device form factor, not a memory technology...and all CF
> cards are also IDE devices. Even the slowest memory is way faster than over
> the CompactFlash interface, even discounting the write problems of the CF
> devices that are Flash-based.
>
>