theswede #100093
Senior Member
This is an important part in deciding; I prefer to have one big card that I never take out of my camera, some people want several cards.
If you constantly swap cards around the chances are bigger that something happens, like a card being dropped. Since MD's are more sensitive to physical abuse (although not much - when they're turned off they're surprisingly resilient) this is bad.
A lot more, yes. As long as you don't bang your cam around.
Yes. It means the CF Microdrives have skyrocketed in popularity.
Correct. The heads rest on the surface when the drive is off, and would stick to the protective coating. This has been fixed, the new coating doesn't stick.
This is also important. Since MD's use more peak power (but not much more average power) and have different tradeoffs than EEPROM they can be faster or slower depending on bus implementation.
It's worth noting that EEPROM is also dead slow, so solid state CF's are in no way inherently faster than MD's. A spun up MD can deliver very high burst rates, and writing on a hard disk is potentially much faster than writing on EEPROM.
Plug a CF MD in a PCMCIA slot on a notebook and you'll see how fast it can really be - they scream when you do that.
For convenience, in my case. Avoiding damage is a side effect.
I have never filled the drive, but that figure does sound rather high. Of course, it could depend on USB implementation and drivers. If I had filled the drive that much I'd probably use the PCMCIA adapter to empty the card - it empties in a couple of minutes using that.
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Jesper