Compactflash (memory) cards have many intended and unintended uses. They are marketed as "
film" for
digital cameras, where they see wide use. Some portable
MP3 players can read CF cards, which is a boon for users as
solid state alternatives (generally fixed,
MMC, or
Flashmedia) have not reached the
commodity price point of CF.
Because CF (memory) cards provide ATA functionality it is trivial to press them into service solid state disk ("SSD") drives. Compared with "real" SSD drives (often used in the military; Quantum makes one) CF cards have a shorter design life than standard DRAM, with a nominal expectation of 100,000 write cycles (reads have negligible impact on flash memory). This is offset by the availability of CF media at a fraction of the cost.
Common Uses
- digital cameras
- mp3 players
- portable and PDA computers
Creative Uses
- server farms, sans mechanical disks
- standalone diskless workstations (i.e. no BOOTP server)
- "cheap", low-power, solid-state RAID array (ATA-firewire bridge chips work well)
- PGP key storage
- internationally portable DeCSS mirror ;-)