Addonics has a new CF Adapter

[Comte]

I saw in Maximum PC that Addonics has a CF (compact flash) adapter for several applications, one of which would put a CF card on an IDE connector on the motherboard and be recognized as a HDD. I wonder if getting on of them, adding a 4gb card, and then using that for the swap file would be worth it or not. Any opinions?

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/adeb44idecf.asp

 

[sandmanx]

That doesn't make a great swap drive. Although with 4GB and algorithms for reading and writing should make the limited writes not that big of a deal, you still have the relatively slow speed of CF to deal with. The only real gain you get out of this is non sequential access, there is no seek time.

That's what I've heard on the situation, but I'm sure there are others out there that know more on it.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Flash drives are generally very slow on writes. In general, you do get 1ms reads, random, but writes are more like 4ms for 128k, and if you write a smaller block it still takes 4ms. That sounds better than hard drives, which are 8-9 ms for 10k disks or 13-14 for 7.2k disks, but for sequential transfers it's pretty lousy. I don't think I've seen definitive testing stating it's fast or slow, but if you try it please report your findings.