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(Mike Rivers) wrote in news:znr1122310342k@trad:

For me, a just barely big enough flash card would be enough to record
over a whole weekend, perhaps 20 to 30 hours.

For that, I agree, nothing less that a notebook class hard drive will do
(as, for example, in the Sound Devices 722). As you and I can buy them for
$60 retail, you'd think they could be put in a reasonable machine, but
these low-volume machines sell at ferocious hardware markups to amortize
development, marketing, and handholding, so I'm afraid ones with such
drives will remain expensive. Microdrives in that capacity are not
current, and in CF envelope I'm not convinced magnetic disk has the
permanent advantage over semiconductor memory that seems so clear in the
larger forms.

I haven't used $1,000-$1,500 worth of media on a weekend recording gig
since the 2" tape days. Sure, you can re-use it, but it would take a
week on-and-off to transfer all those cards to another medium.

The upload speed from a decent card in a decent reader may rival the upload
speed from an HD, but I imagine you are thinking about swap time. At the
moment, on the 722, uploading from the card is actually faster (about 6
Mbytes/second vs. 3, in round numbers), the HD being limited by a 1394
implementation that wants tuning.

But, nit-picking aside, I can see CF is not yet the answer for someone with
your recording duration need. In maybe three years, quite possibly yes.

I wonder whether the firmware in these CF machines actually is set up to
handle cards bigger than 2 or 4 Gb. There are some implementation seams at
those two points which may trip up a machine or two. I can vouch the 722
handles a 4Gb card from personal use.