CompactFlash card under the hood

[jholm90]

I am looking for a bit of an insight on what goes on with some old CompactFlash cards and why certain ones work and others don't work too well. I had a few old cards laying around and none of them seemed to work with my Red Lion data collector. Fortunately the tech support was able to point me in a SanDisk area and I've got a new one on order.

Is there any guts or internal firmware inside these cards that makes my Cisco card different than your SanDisk card and can I do anything to fix it? I am not using anything larger than 1GB and have them formatted to FAT16. I never had any issues with uploading from the old black panelviews and robot controllers so the cards are indeed good ones.

FYI below is the RedLion support message that I received today and the phone support was excellent to walk through this. I'll pass it along for the next poor chap in my seat. The slow flash on the STS light required me to pull the CF card out before it would talk with my laptop again because I had an unsupported branded card.

As discussed, you have an issue getting the CF card to work on a DSPZR. You said it was a Cisco brand CF card. That may be a problem, that is not a supported brand.

Not all brands of Compact Flash (CF) cards will function properly in our older generation HMI and related Interface products that use CF cards. If you use an unsupported brand, it may or may not work. Red Lion only recommends the following CF card brands: Smart Modular Technologies, SanDisk, Silicon Systems, SimpleTech, and SwissBit.

We only support 2 GB or less. You may use larger cards if they are supported brands/models. But to do that you need to format the card with Crimson. That will make it a FAT16 with 2 GB usable storage.

We do sell CF cards by Smart Modular Technologies. They are industrial grade, UL listed, and rated for 2 million write cycles. The part numbers are G3CF001G and G3CF002G for 1 GB and 2 GB cards respectively.

Note 1: The SanDisk Ultra 50 MBIT speed cards will not work properly with any "V1" generation system unless they have Crimson 3 build 694 or later. Affected models are all G303 and all G306 versions. All current generation 8", 10", and 15" models will work, but older "V1" models which only support C2 would also be affected and will not work. All 8" and higher G3 models that support C3 will work. With the Data Station and Modular Controller series, all models LE, SX, and GT will be affected by this issue, and require C3 build 694 or later. The ZR models are not affected and should work, and so should the PTV.

Note 2: SanDisk has another new line of higher speed cards called Extreme 160 MBIT that have issues. These will not work with any model including V2 level units.