Thoughts on PCMCIA vs Ultrabay storage media?

[Mobil1]

I'm in need of additional data storage, would a CF card make a good alternative to using a secondary harddrive? Something along the lines of:

8 or 16 GB CF card via a PCMCIA adapter->PCMCIA slot

or

7200k hd via secondary Ultrabay adapter->Ultrabay slot

The harddrive would win out in capacity for sure but would the CF card have the clear advantage with performance, heat and battery life?

[dash7540]

I'm sure a CF card would win regarding less heat and more battery life (no moving parts), but for performance, it would depend on the PCMCIA adapter itself.

[chan_man]

If you want speed, then USB 2.0 is better than pcmcia. You can get a USB2 reader for the CF card. This approach is much better with battery life than a second HDD in the ultrabay but the capacity is not there.

I keep a 120gig in the ultrabay for my music etc and on the T42P, I can still get over 3 hours of battery life with a 9 cell battery.

[dash7540]

If you want speed, then USB 2.0 is better than pcmcia.

Actually that's not quite true. USB 2.0 has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 60MB/s, but in real world situations it's roughly half that. PC Card maxes out at 132 MB/s, and I would surmise real world performance is less, but still faster than USB 2.0.