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The third type of memory card technology is Flash RAM. Flash RAM has the ROM advantages of not needing a battery to retain its data, and the SRAM advantages of being writeable.

The implementation of different Flash RAM cards vary. Sundisk was the first company to introduce a writeable Flash RAM card for the 95LX. These cards conform to a supplemental PCMCIA-ATA standard that allows them to appear as more conventional IDE hard drives to the 95LX or a PC. This has the advantage of raising the upper limit on capacity to the full 32M available under DOS 3.22 on the 95LX. Due to physical constraints, the maximum size currently available is 10MB (20M using compression software). This yields the cheapest cost-per-megabyte for high storage capacities.

While Sundisk has achieved a tremendous technological feat, its cards have some disadvantages. First, the card is not readable or bootable without a "device driver" (small software program) already running on the 95LX. This is not much of a problem, unless your 95LX's C drive corrupts or is otherwise lost. Sundisk users might want to carry an additional SRAM card with the files necessary to reinstall the Sundisk device driver — just in case!

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Sundisk Flash ROM Cards

At the time this article was written, the only Flash Technology entry that may be used on the 95LX is from Sundisk (see ad, page 10 this issue). This card has the advantage of not needing a battery to retain its data, however it does require its software driver be in memory in order to read it. The result of this is that you must have its driver either on C: drive or on a SRAM card when you reboot your 95LX. Sundisk is planning to include a ROM card to be used when rebooting, after which you can insert the Flash card.

The Sundisk card is available with or without Stacker compression software. As delivered, the card is formatted with large, 4K clusters. This has no impact on disk space if you are using Stacker, but it has a big impact if you are not. (See the discussion of cluster size above.) Sundisk may make available a utility that can format the Sundisk card with the smaller, 512 byte clusters.

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