I know my N800 has 2 slots to add memory cards. Is there a difference between the two?

Is it that one is just easier to swap in and out?

Is one considered internal and the other external?

Does the machine access one better than another?

Just curious.

unless you have the newest firmware, there is a bit of a difference in the card slots.

the one under the battery door is considered the internal card slot, and may not be hot swappable, i've never tried. the one on the bottom of the device is considered the removable card slot, and is definitely hot swappable.

with the prior firmware, many had issues where the removable card slot wound up killing the card in it (usually an SDHC card which are 4 GB and larger). some folks did have trouble with the internal card slot doing the same thing, but i dont think there were as many cases.

i dont believe the device handles one card slot better than the other, in terms of access speeds or anything like that.

They're both hot swappable, but the one under the battery covery (the internal slot) is generally considered as the more pemanent of the two - the internal card is where the virtual memory swap file is stored, for example, and while the device works fine if the swap file disappears (because the card is removed) it's located on that card (and not the external one) since the internal card is considered less likely to be swapped in and out to load new music/video media etc.

You can replace cards in the internal slot as you want, just as with the external slot. When you remove the back panel there's a little magnet that informs the N800 about what you're doing, and it will unmount the card for you (that is, put it offline ready for removal) - the same happens when you open that little hinged cover for the external slot.

There's one exception to this rule though: If you enable swap space on the internal card (that's the 'extend virtual memory' in the control panel) then you shouldn't remove the internal card. At least you should be very careful - if any of that is in use then the card can't be unmounted.

EDIT: Ah, Milhouse beat me to it while I was writing -- and in fewer words

Good explanations, thanks. It may be worthwhile to note that if there is some process that is accessing the data on either card and you open the back panel or external access door for that card, you will get a warning "Memory card in use. Removing card may damage data..." I find that it sometimes takes a few seconds for the warning to appear (especially on my 4GB "external" card. (And it's not always obvious that a process is running - there are background processes such as the meta crawler that access the cards without the user's knowledge. At least that's my experience.)