MMC or SD - Which one is appropriate for me

[Martin I Pettinger]

Hi

I am looking to purchase some memory for my iPAQ 3850. The memory will be used for mp3's and hopefully pdf's if Acrobat Reader for the PPC will read files from a memory card.

Question - is it worth paying more for SD - is SD much quicker than MMC and will my iPAQ take advantage of the Secure aspect of Secure Digital. By the way I have upgraded ROM on device as I thought there was a problem with iPAQ's "eating" SD cards.

Martin

[Kati Compton]

Is there anything at this point that requires you to have a memory card be "secure" in order to use it? I've heard that SD cards (and I would assume MMC as well?) are faster at 256+ MB. I haven't looked very hard for SD/MMC cards as I am a CF person, but when I did look, I had a much harder time finding plain MMC than SD. Especially at the larger sizes. I don't remember seeing MMC larger than 128... I might have been looking in the wrong place though.

I don't think I'm helping, but there it is.

[Janak Parekh]

Given that you have a 3800-series iPaq, you're going to get virtually no benefit out of SD except that they're available in higher capacities. The 3850 only supports 1-bit speeds and no "security" or SDIO support.

Basically: go for whatever's cheaper and readily available.

Oh, and I don't think there are any "S" features available just yet for SD cards anyway. Theoretically we'll be able to buy cards with music on them that's not copyable off, etc. Haven't seen anything actually hit the market, though.

--janak

[Kati Compton]

Oh, and I don't think there are any "S" features available just yet for SD cards anyway. Theoretically we'll be able to buy cards with music on them that's not copyable off, etc. Haven't seen anything actually hit the market, though.


My uninformed theory is that companies will try to copy-protect their CD's such that you have to use special software to rip the music, and that they will only let you rip to SD cards instead of MMC. But that's a guess. Don't know if the S part was actually designed to work that way. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much point to getting an SD blank memory card, would there? Only ones with content pre-installed.

[Janak Parekh]

My uninformed theory is that companies will try to copy-protect their CD's such that you have to use special software to rip the music, and that they will only let you rip to SD cards instead of MMC.
But how does that control distribution? Will there be a state flag stored in a part of your "trusted computing environment" that's unreachable to control where you have a piece of music?

But that's a guess. Don't know if the S part was actually designed to work that way. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much point to getting an SD blank memory card, would there? Only ones with content pre-installed.
True. Another possibility is that SD cards would allow copying music on but not off. A number of different handheld MP3 devices do this already.

--janak

[Pony99CA]

I am looking to purchase some memory for my iPAQ 3850. The memory will be used for mp3's and hopefully pdf's if Acrobat Reader for the PPC will read files from a memory card.

Others have answered your SD vs. MMC question, so I'll take the Acrobat Reader question. Reader will be able to read off of an SD card.

Steve