PCMCIA Storage:-

Today's PCMCIA/CF storage support densities in the gigabyte realm. The storage cards come in different flavors:

1. Miniature IDE disk drives or microdrives. These are tiny versions of mechanical hard drives that use magnetic media. Their data transfer rates are typically higher than solid state memory devices, but IDE drives have spin-up and seek latencies before data can be transferred. The IDE Card Services driver ide_cs, in conjunction with legacy IDE drivers, is used to communicate with such memory cards.

2. Solid-state memory cards that emulate IDE. Such cards have no moving parts and are usually based on flash memory, which is transparent to the operating system because of the IDE emulation. Because these drives are effectively IDE-based, the same IDE Card Services driver (ide_cs) can be used to talk to them.

3. Memory cards that use flash memory, but without IDE emulation. The memory_cs Card Services driver provides block and character interfaces over such cards. The block interface is used to put a file system onto card memory, whereas the character interface is used to access raw data. You may also use memory_cs to read the attribute memory space of any PCMCIA card.