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-- Difference between 8mg flash upgrade and Visor Delux? (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=39)

IS the 8 meg flash upgrade a flash like card that upgrades the Visor Solo to the 8 megabyte Visor Delux, or is it simply a springboard?

They are different. Visor Deluxe has 8MB RAM, Flash is ROM (technically). It takes approximately 50 to 250 times as long to write to FLASH as it does to write to RAM. This means you generally don't want to use RAM for user data, it slows down the system.

FLASH is generally used for applications, so this would allow you to download a LOT of PalmOS apps into the FLASH, and keep the RAM open for actual data. Normally, PalmOS downloads the apps into RAM since that's all you have.

That said, it's important to note that FLASH is non-volatile, ie it won't lose it's contents if your batteries die like you will w/ RAM. So in some cases, important user data is backed-up to FLASH (see the Backup Springboard). But you generally don't want to store data there for day to day use, it's too slow.

FLASH also has a limited number of writes. It use to be around 10,000 or 100,000 writes (per block). I have seen ads for FLASH products that can do 1,000,000 writes, and ones for 10,000,000 writes. At the time those were special "extra durable" FLASH parts, but that was many years ago. I'm not sure how many writes a tipical FLASH part has today, but I'm pretty sure it isn't unlimited.

Oh, and I think the limit is really on the number of times you can blank out a FLASH block (set it to all 0 or all 1 depending on teh FLASH part). FLASH blocks use to be 64K or larger, but AMD brought out some very popular parts with 4K blocks, so I susspect the block size m,ay be smaller now...

Now, wasn't that more then you ever wanted to know about FLASH?