[Help] cardbus vs pcmcia
Daniel
one can also support 32bit CardBus cards.
Can I buy a CardBus Fast Ethernet card and use it on both of my notebooks?
The quantity of pins in both types looks same. Is it possibile that CardBus
card can auto-detect which bus it's pulgged in?
Thanks in advance,
Daniel Chen
Jared Valentine
won't even "fit" into the slot. If you have a machine that only has
16bit PC Card/PCMCIA slots, you will need to buy a 16bit Network Adapter.
Jared Valentine
(anti-spam measures in place, remove "j." to reply via e-mail)
In article <7fg6qn$4uu$1...@birch.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
nos...@whitehouse.org says...
Val Harrop
run in the cardbus notebook.
Val
Jared Valentine wrote in message ...
Sam Samalin
bit pcmcia slots in my i7k.
Alexei Boukirev
Sam Samalin <ssam...@ionet.net> wrote in message
news:371BE7B8...@ionet.net...
> Thats not what I heard. I was told cardbus would fit into
the "cardbus ready" 16
> bit pcmcia slots in my i7k.
matters is controller. When your specs say that PCMCIA slot
is CardBus ready that means you have CardBus controller
there. That's almost all you need to use CardBus card (you
also need drivers, OS support, and maybe some adjustment in
BIOS). CardBus controller simply uses some
pin(s) to sense CardBus card and then maps the rest of pins
(or most of them) directly on PCI as though your PC Card is
a PCI device (it usually inherits inteerupt line from
CardBus controller though). Older PCMCIA controllers do not
support CardBus and won't even recognize card in the slot if
it's CardBus.
Alexei
Alex Brin
Daniel <nos...@whitehouse.org> wrote in message
news:7fg6qn$4uu$1...@birch.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
> I have two notebooks, one can only support 16 bit PCMCIA cards and the
other
> one can also support 32bit CardBus cards.
> Can I buy a CardBus Fast Ethernet card and use it on both of my notebooks?
> The quantity of pins in both types looks same. Is it possibile that
CardBus
> card can auto-detect which bus it's pulgged in?
>
> Daniel Chen
What are the notebooks? It seems some companies who buy their
laptops/motherboards from OEM's aren't clear on their Cardbus vs PCMCIA
capabilities. Almost all notebooks made since 97 have Cardbus-compatible
controllers, and as a matter of fact, most Pentium 150MMX and up laptops
will have Cardbus.
Usually, the easiest way to find out if you have Cardbus (and who makes your
Cardbus controller) is to look at Device Manager. If, under "PCMCIA
Sockets", you see just one entry, "Intel PCIC or compatible", then you have
a 16-bit PCMCIA-only controller. If you see *two* entries instead, that say
something like "TI 1250 Cardbus" or "Ricoh RL5C476 Cardbus", you'll know you
have 32-bit Cardbus controllers. (There is always one driver listed per
slot for Cardbus, unlike 16-bit PCMCIA.)
Anyway. Cardbus is a 32-bit bus specification which is essentially standard
PCI (32 bits, bus master capability, 33MHz) with warm-swappability and
detection capabilities added; it also adds better power management and 3.3V
device capability. Most importantly, *Cardbus is backwards compatible with
16-bit PCMCIA*.
PCMCIA is essentially a variation on the 16-bit, 8MHz bus. It's 5V, has
limited power management capabilities, and can only use 16-bit PCMCIA cards.
A Cardbus card will *not be detected* by a system that does not have a
Cardbus controller.
Since the majority of cards out there are 16-bit PCMCIA, and given that both
old PCMCIA-only and Cardbus laptops can use either without difficulty, most
people don't bother to familiarize themselves with the differences between
Cardbus (virtually all current laptops) and the old PCMCIA-only buses (older
Pentium, 486 laptops.)
Generally, there is no real need for the much higher performance
capabilities of Cardbus adapters for the simple reason that the majority of
adapter cards don't come close to the roughly 5MBytes/sec (or roughly 50
megabits/sec) that 16-bit PCMCIA can typically sustain. By contrast,
Cardbus-specific cards are capable of up to 130MB/sec (== ~1300Mbits/sec),
and can implement bus-mastering (freeing the host CPU from having to do the
transfer), but that's total overkill for a 56K modem, or even a 10baseT
Ethernet adapter (=10Mbits/sec, or ~1MB/sec), or a ZIP drive. :)
Some applications where 32-bit Cardbus cards *are* an advantage:
1. For high-speed external hard drives/storage that are capable of
bus-master transfers and that have sustained media rates that can exceed
2-3MB/sec.
2. For 100baseTx (100Mbps Fast Ethernet, which is roughly 10MB/sec).
Again, 16-bit PCMCIA type 2 cards should work fine in a 32-bit Cardbus slot,
since Cardbus is backwards compatible. However, a 32-bit Cardbus card
(which is essentially equivalent to the comparable PCI card for a desktop)
will *only* work in a Cardbus slot, and cannot possibly function in a 16-bit
PCMCIA-only slot. If a Cardbus card *did* was detected when you plugged it
in, then you have Cardbus controllers, not PCMCIA. :)
Hope this helps.
Jared Valentine
slots"? It's a contradiction in terms. Maybe they meant that you have
Cardbus slots that will also take standard 16bit PC Cards?
Jared Valentine
(anti-spam measures in place, remove "j." to reply via e-mail)
In article <371BE7B8...@ionet.net>, ssam...@ionet.net says...
> Thats not what I heard. I was told cardbus would fit into the "cardbus ready" 16
> bit pcmcia slots in my i7k.
>
> Jared Valentine wrote:
>
> > No. Cardbus cards are physically different than PCMCIA cards and usually
> > won't even "fit" into the slot. If you have a machine that only has
> > 16bit PC Card/PCMCIA slots, you will need to buy a 16bit Network Adapter.
> >
> > Jared Valentine
> > (anti-spam measures in place, remove "j." to reply via e-mail)
> >
> > In article <7fg6qn$4uu$1...@birch.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
> > nos...@whitehouse.org says...
Daniel
Daniel Chen
Sam Samalin
software (like Softex) to run cardbus cards.
Alexei Boukirev wrote:
> Sam Samalin <ssam...@ionet.net> wrote in message
> news:371BE7B8...@ionet.net...
> > Thats not what I heard. I was told cardbus would fit into
> the "cardbus ready" 16
> > bit pcmcia slots in my i7k.