is it worth using a CF card as a hdd?

[dtokez]

hi all, im building a media centre pc / file server and i've seen some devices that convert compact flash cards to sata or ide. I was considering buying one along with a 16gb card and testing it out

is it worth it or will the read/write speeds be a waste of time?

thanks

 

[wonderlust]

I have a CF to IDE adaptor and tried it with a 1Gb card, it was painfully slow best I could get the bios to give was PIO mode.

 

[mod1fied]

Best use of one of these if an OS is going on one would be something like FreeNAS or that other one. So all HDD space can be used as storage.

As already said, not worth it for a media center.

 

[Bob Wya Jnr]

hi all, im building a media centre pc / file server and i've seen some devices that convert compact flash cards to sata or ide. I was considering buying one along with a 16gb card and testing it out

is it worth it or will the read/write speeds be a waste of time?

thanks

In essence CF cards are not designed to function as a SSD. So they won't have wear levelling and they won't have write caching.

I've tried using one and it's really slow. You'd have to use Linux on the card - it has options to cache log files,etc. in the RAM when running from flash storage (the card would be trashed by Windows - never mind the speed). As has already been said the R/W performance would only allow the running of NAS Box/file server, fire wall/traffic shaper, etc. It would be too slow run a Media Centre.

Bob

 

[dtokez]

thanks all. i think i might just use the system as a nas then more than likely

 

[TheRoadWarrior]

i've built pcs running xp on cf cards before, it does work and isnt too slow. Ideally you need one of the sandisk industrial grade cards with full ATA support and then a proper IDE CF to IDE adapter.
Granted the disk wont last as long as a proper SSD and the performance will be lower- but it does work