Michael A. Terrell wrote:
"David R.Birch" wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:

What is the advantage of these drives over, say, a 32 GB jump drive at
$70 (this week at Office Depot)? Speed? If so, how great is that
advantage in practice?

They replace the hard drive in a computer. Someone was asking about
small hard drives for machine tools. Spinning storage with an IDE/PATA
interface is disappearing from the market. What good is a jump drive on
something with no USB port?
We have that problem at work. Our newer Mitsubishi LASER CNC control
runs on Win95. The only network option is a PCMCIA reader and LAN card
in the reader. We installed the hardware and got the control to
recognize a laptop running Win2KPro, and vice versa, but so far, we
haven't gotten drive access to allow us to transfer files back and forth.


These are a huge improvement over the old 28 pin 'M-Drive' we used to
run embedded NT in one product about 10 years ago. They are a lot
larger, too. They were $380 for a 32 MB soft drive.

If your CNC will run with one of the formats that Windows can use,
you can format the solid state drive & install the software, then just
plug it into the CNC machine. You could even make a duplicate drive to
use for troubleshooting or emergency repairs. It's cheap production
insurance at those prices.

Right now we'd be happy if we could load files from anything other
than the failing floppy drive. The control has a db25 serial port, but
for some reason, Mitsubishi decided that just being able to transfer
files with a COM program shouldn't work.

David