$2,000 for the 2Gb? That has to be a sign that they're "the dog's"...
however that is too expensive for us.
The 800mb ones go on eBay quite regularly and I think they're only
about $60 USD. That's sixty!
There were two brands, one of them was SimpleTech so use that as a
keyword. The other was SiliconTech 800Mb 2.5" flash drives. They're
the thickness of a floppy and have a row of standard IDE port pins on
them.
I've seen Amiga 1200s for sale with built-in SiliconTech 800Mb disks
after following a link on Amiga.org. They look fantastic.
As for using a CompactFlash as a RAM Disk - that would be incredibly
slow. The Mitsubishi Melcard PCMCIA memory cards that the PCMCIA slot
is designed for (Sys:Tools/Prepcard) will run at 160Ns/200Ns which
compared to 60Ns FastRAM is very slow indeed. Take into account that a
Melcard is SRAM which is a kind of perishable RAM...
The CompactFlash cards aren't perishable upon power-down and take a
lot longer to write to in electronics terms.
Even the 2Mb Melcards were only really of use as storage mediums as
when they were used as RAM: they would slow things down a lot.
If you want another example, think of how long it takes to save a game
on Dreamcast compared to N64. The VMs use flash memory of some sort
whereas the N64 paks have battery backup. Faster but less safe should
you drop one on a hard surface or the battery runs down.
:-)
I wouldn't mind getting a Subway USB adaptor for the A1200 though,
those 128Mb USB pens are cheap as chips!
;-)
