29-10-2010, 03:52 PM
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SmartMedia
Introduction.
The SmartMedia format was launched in the summer of 1995 to compete with the
MiniCard, Compact Flash, and PC card formats. Although memory cards are nowadays
associated with digital cameras, digital audio players, PDAs, and similar devices,
SmartMedia was likely as a successor to the computer floppy disk. Indeed, the format was
originally named Solid State Floppy Disk Card (SSFDC). The SSFDC forum, an
association aiming to promote SSFDC as an industry standard, was founded in April
1996, consisting of 37 initial members. A Smart Media card consists of a single NAND
flash chip embedded in a thin plastic card, although some higher capacity cards contain
multiple, linked chips. It was one of the smallest and thinnest of the early memory cards,
only 0.76mm thick, and managed to maintain a favorable cost ratio as compared to the
others. Smart Media cards lack of built-in controller chip, which kept the cost down. This
feature later caused problems, since some older devices would require firmware updates
to handle larger capacity cards. The lack of built-in controller also made it impossible for
the card to perform automatic wear leveling, a process which prevents premature wear out
of a sector by mapping the writes to various other sectors in the card. SmartMedia cards
can be used in a standard 3.5" floppy drive by means of a Flash Path adapter. This is
possibly the only way of obtaining flash memory functionality with very old hardware,
and it remains one of Smart Media’s most distinctive features. This method's big
drawback is that it is very slow. Read/write is limited to floppy disk speeds, meaning that
copying 64 megabytes of data by this method is a very boring process, although usually
preferable to not copying it at all.
