I think that the ability of an imbedded processor such as the 8051 or one of its many brothers and sisters to access a Compact Flash card on a file basis has quite an attraction because of the simplicity of its use at the application level, both on the PC end and on the embedded end. There is also the grat advantage of being able to easily deal with data of several different classes and with the various capacities of cards in a logical manner.

I can appreciate the direction where many may choose to use the 8051 end to just deal with the CF card as a raw block data device as the simplest way to go. But I really think that is a robust freeware FAT system for CF cards were available that we would see a lot of people use it.

Michael Karas