[NTLK] Newton Compact Flash - Battery Life, Alternative storage methods?

[William Maloney]

Using something smaller was my thought too. I tried to persuade the guy at
the Best Buy that 4GB was far too much but again, twas all they had. It
worked but again, painfully slow. A bit much for this old Newt. Doing a
swap seems like a great idea. Someone will inevitably get a very good deal!
:)

By the way, did you notice any marked improvement with battery life using a
smaller card? I tried fiddling with the power settings but couldn't manage
to get it down. This card ate through double AAs much faster than
anticipated. Does having a different CF PC-card adapter have anything to do
with it?

A third question also -- when NewtonOS2 has quite a few packages on, are
there any programs or shells you use to help manage that much data? Having
to scroll through the extras box becomes a tad monotonous when dealing with
package after package.

On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Gavin Watson <gavin83209 at gmail.com> wrote:

> A couple of years ago, I bought a 266x 8 GB CF card with the intention
> of using it in my Newton, but it was painfully slow. After a bit of
> research, I traded the 8 GB card for the 50x 512 MB card in a friend's
> camera. The 512 MB card is probably ten times faster and more stable in
> my MP2100 and I still don't even have 30 MB of data on the card. It
> still isn't quite as fast as linear flash, but it's at least comparable.
> If you can find one, try a CF card in the 128-512 MB range and see if it
> helps.
>
> For battery life, there is an option in ATA Support Preferences to put
> the card to sleep after a certain delay. Try 10 seconds or something
> similar if you aren't already. Unlike MicroDrives, CF cards don't have
> any moving parts, so they take almost no time to come out of sleep mode.
>
> On 07/04/2012 06:29 AM, William Maloney wrote:
> > Hey, running a SanDisk Ultra CompactFlash card running at 30MB/s and
> with a
> > total storage of 4GB. I bought this for $20 at Best Buy as an alternative
> > to my IBM MicroDrive with Guyot's ATA Driver. Unfortunately, the CF card
> is
> > almost as slow as the MicroDrive and takes up nearly as much battery. Is
> > there a way to reduce the amount of power this thing eats up? I don't
> think
> > the adapter plays much role, but it is also a stock "PC Card adapter for
> > IBM MicroDrives". Also, does anyone know of any other storage methods
> that
> > are efficient and quick to use? Standard flash cards are just too small
> and
> > like to be able to use one card if possible.
>
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