Compact Flash HDD Question

cavemanoc

cavemanoc

cavemanoc

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I'm busy trying to breathe some life into a friends old laptop that he wants to use as a media machine. It's an old P3 limited to 256mb of RAM. (Running XP) Unfortunately the RAM cannot be increased and it is painfully slow in pretty much everything it does - even after a pretty aggressive strip and clean to streamline the XP install.

The big problem is obviously the HDD which is old/slow and constantly used as a Page File - slowing down everything. I managed to find a Lexar 8 gb 300x (45mb/s r/w) for around £59 which would be perfect as a cheap replacement hdd (with an el cheapo £1.99 converter)

Can anyone see any obvious problems with this? I know there is little/no wear leveling on the CF cards, but it really shouldn't be too much of a problem as it will only see light use and probably won't last more than a year or 2 before he retires it completely.
 
You are aware you can get a 160GB 5300rpm disk for 2/3 of that price tho ? does nearly 30MB/s on my box...

Otherwise you can get a x133 card for £14, if you want to spend even less money :D
 
With usb your not likely to get above 30MB/s. And usb hard drives are cheaper so why you would want to use cf is beyond me.
 
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Energize said:
With usb your not likely to get above 30MB/s. And usb hard drives are cheaper so why you would want to use cf is beyond me.
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Not sure where the usb bit came from - I'm talking about using a CF-IDE converter, the machine will see the CF card as a standard ide HDD (no driver issues which is important.)

I accept that the newer hdds are a lot quicker than his current one (15mb/s and 19ms), but I'm pretty sure that it's both the read/write, and the access I need to improve. The 300x card will give me 45mb/s read/write (minimum!) and an access time of <0.1ms - all in all a pretty good 'drive'!

He really doesn't need any more space - the 160Gb (or even less) would be wasted space - I have the full install down to about 5Gb so the 8gb card gives more than enough space.

TBH I was thinking more in terms of hardware problems that I hadn't foreseen - the 'idea' of what I'm doing I'm comfortable with - CF is the way for soooo many reasons on this build unless there's a tech problem I'm missing.
 
Make sure your laptop's IDe interface is up to that sort of speed tho. I had a laptop of that sort of generation and it was very limited (ATA33 or something)

Otherwise yes the IDE->CF would work well. I'm currently building a system with 2 SATA->CF adapters to run as RAID 1 in linux for a small server. Thats why I picked the Transcend 8GB x133 pair :D
 
BusError said:
Make sure your laptop's IDe interface is up to that sort of speed tho. I had a laptop of that sort of generation and it was very limited (ATA33 or something)

Otherwise yes the IDE->CF would work well. I'm currently building a system with 2 SATA->CF adapters to run as RAID 1 in linux for a small server. Thats why I picked the Transcend 8GB x133 pair :D
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Good heads up on the bus speed - after a lot of digging it turns out that the mobo is capable of ata66 (UDMA 4) so the 300x will be perfect - I am agonizing over the 133x cards though - they are soooo much cheaper... I can get a 16Gb card for less than the 8Gb 300x one :mad: I wonder how much of a difference the extra 50% read/write speed will make to boot/load times?
 
Edit: disregard - worked it out at last - ATA-66 in UDMA 2 is the best I'll get.

I'm a little confused now - according to this site, UDMA 2 is limited to 33.3MB/s, so what is the point of an ATA-66 unterface then?
 
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I did a few basic tests BTW.

The 5400 PATA HDD reads at 28MB/s sustained
The SATA->CF Transcend x133 card reads at 25MB/s sustained.

So, roughtly the same throughtput, but zero access time, noise, heat.

Also, you can find /dual/ ATA->CF adapters, with just one cable. You could possibly configure it as RAID 0 if you wanted pure raw speed...

I don't understand the rush on SDD stuff with this sort of prices on adapters... I've even seen /3/ cards adaoters that can do RAID10 in hardware (not cheap tho)!
 
Thanks for those results - I've just taken deliver of the 2 cards I'm trialing - 1x4Gb 300x and 1x16Gb 133x - just waiting for the converter to arrive. Unfortunately with it being a laptop I don't think I have the option to use one of the double adapters for raid (would be sweet) but I'm sure that even the 133x will be a significant improvement over the hdd in there now (not to mention the power/heat/noise bonus!)

I'll let you know and run some tests once it's all up and running.

These would never be much of a competitor for SSDs unfortunately - simply too expensive it you want like for like performance and without wear levelling they simply don't have the longevity/redundancy for a serious desktop build. But for a little media build... mmmmmm!
 
Well.... I'm busy trying to install XP onto the 133x ATM and it's not going well - the original install took about 7 hours to complete, and SP3 has been running for about 7 hours and is only half way though the 'installing files' bit :eek:

I have a sneaking suspicion that I've been conned by Kingston and have one of the 'up to' 133x cards, where the 1st little bit is 133x and the rest of the drive is significantly slower - will confirm when it finishes (back end of '09 at present rate :mad:) - in retrospect I should have installed onto the 300x and cloned down instead of the other way around :(
 
Speed** — 25MB/sec. read, 20MB/sec. write
Click to expand...

Shouldn't be too bad - just need to work out what the ** is a disclaimer for :rolleyes: My guess is the old Front end/Back end trick, but I'll check their site.

Edit:
** Speed may vary due to host and device configuration
Click to expand...

So those should be legit speeds - definitely not getting anything near that though... Anyone know if they are all right to format NTFS? I've had problem with CF cards before. Also, in the Bios there is an option for 32bit mode for the drive - Disabled at the moment as I thought it was a legacy option (64bit controller now) could this be the problem?
 
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For info I installed a server-debian on my RAID1 array made if these 2 x133 cards, and for all intend and purpose, they work exactly as a hard drive, and the speed (including writing) is similar to the 2.5"

My "transcend" cards are not even supposed to be a super brand, but so far, it has been working extremely well

s_1227010764419964.jpg
 
Thanks for that info - should be a nice little rig. I have seriously considered a Linux build - but don't have the time now unfortunately to get it all sorted (plus the laptop is from 2001 so I'm not sure what the hardware support will be like.

I've finally got everything installed and ran HDTach - I was quite shocked that everything is running as advertised - 22MB/s and about 0.7ms access. I guess XP just doesn't like running on such a small memory platform. I'm not too sure where to go now - I still have to 300x card which I can try - but I don't think it'll make much of a difference - I suspect I'll have to try to stop the pagefile altogether, which could be interesting on a machine with 256mb of RAM :eek:

It came with Win 2000 so I might just roll it back to that and see how it goes.
 
I tried running my VIA Epia setup off a 133X CF card via a CF>IDE convertor and gave up. Even with 1Gb of ram, it was unworkably slow. I replaced the CF card with a standard HDD and the system was just peachy. I'm now going to buy a laptop HDD to reduce space and noise in my build. I'll chuck the CF card in my camera where it will actually do me some good.
 
Thanks for that - I'm not sure if that will work in my case as the limitation lies with the mobo which will only run to a max of 33MB/s - so even with a faster hdd I would be seriously limited :( I will try Win 2000 and if that doesn't work I may try one of my old laptop hdds
 
has anyone got a reccomendation for a CF to IDE 44 pin adaptor?
need one for my old sony laptop thats got a dead drive and I don't want to spend very much!
 
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