PCMCIA Cards.

Greetings Gentleman,

I am wondering if anyone can help me with a few questions I have concerning PCMCIA cards. We just installed a system that uses them as the backup media for a propritary operator panel.

My big question is how long will the cards be readable if they are stored in the proper enviroment? (1 year, 10 years)

My second question is if anyone knows about a software that will copy the config file off the PCMCIA card and on to my laptop for a extra backup. I do not want to change it, just have it incase the the card dies so I can reload it onto the card. I have software from the company that installed it to load the file onto the PCMCIA card, but not to copy it off.

I did a search of past posts and could not find one that delt with this, so any help would be very apprciated.

Larry

Are you sure it is not Compact Flash (CF) cards that you are talking about? A Compact Flash slot looks a lot like a PCMCIA slot.

I have never seen a memory card using PCMCIA slot.

Regards

If the PCMCIA card is a memory card then you can read whatever you want to from it by inserting it into the PCMCIA slot of a laptop, or a desktop with a PCMCIA card reader.

The card will appear as a new drive, one drive letter higher than the last drive, for instance: G:

It became so difficult to buy PCMCIA memory 2 years ago that we switched to Compact Flash memory and use a PCMCIA flash card adapter that fit the PCMCIA drive.

I have read 6 year old cards without a problem, unlike old floppies that are a gamble.

Therehave been various generations of PCMCIA and even some proprietary knock-offs that form factor wise look like PCMCIA, but are not (some Asian setpoint programmers from the mid '90's).