First post, by stanwebber
i picked up a transcend industrial branded 16gb compact flash card to transfer files and have some extra storage for a pentium 54c laptop and i am seriously underwhelmed. the absolute highest read/write speeds i'm seeing is 550kbps.
i guessing this is a limitation of the 16bit pcmcia or usb adapters i'm using, but i suppose it's possible the flash memory is just that slow. the cf card appears to be a retail consumer unit labeled 'industrial' quality with no other speed designations.
in addition to the all-around dismal performance, i discovered these other nasty surprises:
- win95 rtm/osr1 have no fat32 support so that means 8 fat16 partitions to fully utilize the storage
- the usb adapter i'm using only presents the first partition on the card
- laptop pcmcia boot option doesn't support ata devices
- cardsoft dos drivers 'appear' to support ata devices, but crash the system instantly upon access
- ridiculously priced ataenab appears to be the only viable dos alternative for now, but it crashes under 386 memory managers, especially when using noems switch
- even in pcmcia ata mode, nt (and later) operating systems restrict access to only the first partition on the card by design