19 Oct
2006
19 Oct
'06
3:18 p.m.
I think
you'd definitely want to have enough storage to hold a
complete image--it'd make copying much simpler, no?
I don't see what it would gain you, though. You've still got the same amount
of data to transfer between host and device - and I bet someone can come up
with a situation where they'd want to just read or write a single track rather
than an entire image, which makes transferring an entire image wasteful
(particularly at RS232 speeds!)
Maybe someone can think of a situation where you *need* more than one track in
memory at once, though. (Note I'm not thinking at all about storage formats
which aren't track-based though) Besides, a few
megabytes of RAM is nothing nowadays.
DRAM, no. In that sort of situation providing a SIMM / DIMM socket would seem
the best bet and people can populate it with whatever memory they have to
hand. There is the refresh issue then, though.