SATA Compact Flash

[drak3]

Hello all,

I am thinking of a new project of my, and I found out about SATA adapters that will take in a CF card. The cards look quite fast, and I wonder if using this adapters it will look like a "hard disk" to the system.

Is there a special controller onboard the adapter that hooks with the device driver in the OS and makes the whole thing "adapter + CF" look like a hard disk to the OS?


I assume if the above is true you can RAID?

Hows the speed compared to a small "2.5 disk"? Battery I assume will be best with CF tho right?

Thanks for any info.

 

[rpstewart]

Hello all,

I am thinking of a new project of my, and I found out about SATA adapters that will take in a CF card. The cards look quite fast, and I wonder if using this adapters it will look like a "hard disk" to the system.

Yes

Is there a special controller onboard the adapter that hooks with the device driver in the OS and makes the whole thing "adapter + CF" look like a hard disk to the OS?

There isn't much to it, CF cards are IDE devices so all that's needed is a PATA to SATA bridge.

I assume if the above is true you can RAID?

Don't see why not.

Hows the speed compared to a small "2.5 disk"? Battery I assume will be best with CF tho right?

The best I've seen quoted for a CF card is about 45MB/s write speed which is about on a par with a decent 7200rpm 2.5" disk. Reads aren't always quoted for CF since the high speed ones are aimed at photographers who don't care how long the photos take to download as long as the card doesn't slow their burst shooting down.

The big problem with CF memory is that it has a limited number of write cycles before it dies. The current crop of SSDs have circuitry which distributes writes across the disk to even the "wear", CF cards don't tend to have this.

 

[drak3]

Thanks for your info rpstewart, appreciated.

CF with adaptor is what I need it seems, except the "dies" part.

Are we talking years or months here assuming the "hard disk" (CF) will be accessed like a desktop (will be in the car and play music some hours / day I guess).

Thanks

 

[rpstewart]

Reads are fine, it's writes that are the problem, generally the figues banded about are anything from 10K to 1 million writes per sector. As long as you can limit or remove write intensive operations (swap file, system restore, indexing, defragging etc) then the lifespan should certainly be into years.