Need a driver: Intel PCMCIA Flash card

[Dave Mabry]

Eric J Korpela wrote:

>On 10/11/05, Bruce Lane <kyrrin at bluefeathertech.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Fellow classic'ers,
>>
>>I've been all over Intel's site and Google, and have come up empty.
>>
>>I have here a 4MB PCMCIA 'FLASH' card with Intel's name and colors on it.
>>I know it has a standard MS-DOS filesystem on it, and I'm trying to find a
>>driver to read the thing under Windows 2000 Pro.
>>    
>>
>
>
>
>You shouldn't need a driver for it if it's formatted with a standard MS-DOS
>file system. PCMCIA flash drives (and compact flash) just appear as drives
>on vanilla IDE controllers. I haven't seen one that wasn't recognized when
>inserted. Do other PCMCIA cards work on the system? Does the card tell you
>which standard it's manufactured to (cardbus or cardbus II?)
>
>Eric
>
>I'll resort to FreeBSD if I have to, but I would prefer otherwise. I've
>  
>
>>tried the current version of SystemSoft's CardWizard Pro with no luck.
>>
>>Ideas? Declarations? Speeches about how looney the whole idea is?
>>
>>Thanks much.
>>
>>
>>
>>    
>>

I thought someone would chime in on this before now with the answer, or 
I would have brought it up sooner.  There are basically two types of 
flash memory on PCMCIA cards.  The first type, which was basically a 
linear addressable type, more like ram, is what I think the OP has.  
That one requires drivers in the operating system that manages the flash 
file system (FFS).  Because flash memory is generally limited on the 
number of write cycles it can have before it starts to fail, the FFS 
implements a scheme that rotates through the flash memory array so that 
least recently used cells are used next.  This maximizes the life of the 
entire array by not continuously writing to the same cells, like the 
ones that contain directory information.

As far as I know there is no FFS built into Windows.  Linear flash 
memory was not used that often for several reasons.  Only one was the 
complexity of the FFS overhead.  They were very expensive in the days of 
linear flash PCMCIA cards.

Flash memory in PCMCIA cards became practical, affordable, and easy to 
use all at the same time.  That was when they were packaged in "ATA 
Flash".  The smarts to use LRU (Least Recently Used) cells was packaged 
right in the card.  And the interface on those cards were the same as 
the Type III rotating memory cards.  The cards with hard drives in them 
used that interface.  So to the system that you plugged them into ATA 
Flash cards just appeared as small hard drives.  The guts of the card 
did all the extra handling to make the actual flash cells work.

The last time I fiddled with linear flash on PCMCIA it was in the DOS 
days and I probably used CardSoft or similar package for DOS.  When ATA 
Flash came out in PCMCIA there was almost no reason to use linear flash 
anymore, so I don't know what would be needed today to make it work.

BTW, the one linear flash card I have in my desk is also an Intel.  It 
is marked "Value Series 100" and is labeled for 5volt operation.

Hope this clears it up a bit.

Dave Mabry