Write Protected Flash Disk Module for LEAF

LEAF devices have a tradition of being booted from floppy disks. This is a good tradition because it combines a very good price/performance ratio with the inherent write protection of the floppy disk.

Lately there has been a craving for more initial storage as the LEAF devices become more and more multipurpose appliances and applications grow despite the efforts of the developers to keep them small.

The need for more space has been adressed in in lots of postings to the LEAF newsgroup. There have been several aproaches to solve this problem, each with ist's own merits.

Two floppy drives. This method has the drawback that it is only a temporary remedy to the problem.

CD for initial storage and boot device. This is an almost perfect solution, CD drives are cheap and easy to find, they are a lot faster than floppies and have (for a LEAF device) an almost unlimited storage capacity. Once you have decided what your settings are you can burn this set up to a CD Rom and forget about the floppy.

Some users simply use a hard disk, enough storage but no write protection, also disks draw significantly more current.

A flash card adapter, no moving parts, low current but no write protection.

Enter ADM's or DOM's. There are a few manufacturers which build write protectable flash disk modules. Early in 2002 there was quite a long thread about these but it died away because these things seemed to be as rare as moon stones, at least for the end user.

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