Hard Drive Options for A2100

[cnckid]

I have a one man (me) CNC shop and I was looking through the forum messages on CNCzone.com and came across a post from 2009 about using an SD card instead of a HDD. I have a 1997 Sabre 750 with A2100 control. I purchased a flash drive from a little over a year ago. Had to reclone it twice during the past year as it stopped working. Well, now that the warranty has run out it has quit again and they want another $250 to reclone it again and if it can not be cloned they will sell me another flash drive for $750. I paid $1000 for the first one that has not lasted 14 months so I am not chomping at the bit to dump another $800 or so into this, especially after reading that post. Any help/guidance will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike

[greg b]

Wow I thought the flash drives were very reliable,I was thinking if I had problems with my hard drive in my A2100 that was the way to go,But i had the hard drive the machine came with cloned to a good quality hard drive and have'nt had a problem for 3 years touch wood!Although I must admit my machine is not running 24/7.

[scudzuki]

Flash media has a finite number of read/write cycles before the media wears out. I believe it should last at least a few years, though.

I have had some inexpensive flash drives (thumb drives) stop working on me well before they would have "worn out" due to the aforementioned limitation, however.

How about you clone the media yourself and have some spares? What kind of media does it use?

Joe

[cnckid]

Yes, I think the flash drives are supposed to be the best option and should last longer than 14 months. I could have gotten a lemon, just my luck. I sent it back to Jacobson Machinery, really nice people, where I purchased it and they will check it out and try to clone it again, or sell me a new one if it is toast.

The original hard drive is a Quantum Fireball 40Mb hard drive running Win NT 3.51. I know there are some very tricky issues with cloning and I don't want to loose what I have, but I do need to be able to have a better solution than dumping $1,000 every year or two, not to mention the insecurity feeling, so any instructions on what to get and how to do it is welcomed. The original HD still runs fine, I just had it not boot up a few times and realized I need a backup solution in case the mill goes down. I had put the original HD in the safe while the flash drive was working and then when it would crap out I threw in the original fireball and kept cutting chips. Also, my floppy drive does not work, don't know why, so I use the RS-232 port for file upload and download.