• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

IDE-CF adapter

N

naro

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 17, 2007
Messages
344
adcf3.jpg


hey guys, anyone tried IDE-CF adapter to use as a hdd before?

is it good?

thanks
 
It works good :)

What are you planning on using it for?
 
I'm intending to use CF card for OS and apps.

So, i wondering the performance of a 150x CF card would be better than a Raptor.

Also, I've read that there's a limited write cycles for CF cards and pondering over its reliability.
 
yes, CF's have limited write cycle and are supposed to use write "leveling" to maximize their lifetime. I would think twice about putting a frequently used pagefile on a CF 'drive'.
 
yup.. the write cycles is one of the limiting factors.

CF cards usually have about 300,000 write cycles. So the solution is to disable pagefile.
 
Hi,

There is absolutely no way that you can beat a WD Raptor using a *generic* 150x CF card.

If you partition a WD Raptor down to 8GB you'll get a seek of maybe 1ms, plus an average latency of 3ms, that's about 4ms versus about 1ms of a decent CF card - but the sustained data rate will be 70MB/s instead of 15MB/s.

You might have better luck using a SanDisk Extreme IV CF that supports UDMA-4 and read rates of up to 40MB/s. Most "High Speed" CF use the non-standard PIO-6 mode, so ATA hosts fall back to PIO-4 with theoretical maximum of about 15MB/s.

You should also know that there are "Industrial Grade" CF cards supporting UDMA and 1.000.000 cycles, but these are too slow compared to the Extreme IV CF.

To sum up the potential problems with cards and CF-IDE adapters:
- Host: Proper support of PIO / MDMA modes
- Host: Support of Removable media as Disk
- Adapter: Master/Slave settings
- Adapter: 5V or 3.3V supply voltage
- Card: Proper support of PIO / MDMA / UDMA modes
- Card: ID as Fixed / Removable

Hans-Jürgen
 
I don't read japanese, but, that does seem like a neat product based on the pictures.
I still don't think you're going to get the speed you're looking for out of that solution, especially compared to the cost of the whole setup as compared to a 15K SAS or SCSI drive. I caught 50MB/s in there somewhere, half that of a 15K drive :(
 
i don't read Japanese, i use Babbelfish to help me to translate. From there, the read/write speed is about 55MB/s.

How about just using the IDE-CF adapters on IDE Raid cards? Cool idea?
 
Raptors or SCSI should still be faster...

IDE is just so slow compared to SATA/SCSI and CF cards are not as fast as you may think


If you want to go to all this work, get one of those ram drives from gigabyte that uses system memory as a hard drive....that is where you will get true speed:D
 
iRAMs are very expensive.

Anyway, i'm thinking of using the CF cards to store the OS for my file server, with the pagefile assigned to other hdd, to save on power consumption.
 
I have one and harvested (2) 6 gig Seagate CF drive from pocket drives scored from Ebay. I plan on using it in a MAME cabinet that I'm building this winter. The ROMS are on a file server. Its not going to set any speed records, but for low noise/heat applications it works fine.
 
thats a microdrive though isn't it?

Seagate only makes microdrives to my knowledge that are CF sized, but actually mini hard drives (with platters and such).

Good way to save on power, plus you do not have to worry about limited write cycles, but not solid state CF per say
 
Just looked around and found out that Microdrives have slow seek times which CF cards wont have so much trouble with.

But CF cards have limited write cycles. Hence, have to set pagefile to a hdd.

Argh!!! Microdrives or CF cards??
 
What do you want it for?

File server would be fine with slower seek times...
 
i intend to use either a MicroDrive or CF to install the OS for my file server.

MicroDrive has a slower seek time while CF will need another hdd or MicroDrive for pagefile.
 
Honestly I think you are wasting your time and money. Your goal is unrealistic.

At first I thought you were going to use it for an appliance application or just to play with, but to actually use it in a production enviroment expecting to set records is unrealistic... you deal with limited writes and you deal with slower speeds... not to mention limited space.

I would just get a raptor and be done with it.
 
I think I'm too ambitious too. haha..

maybe I will play with it for fun first. see how its performance is.
 
its crazy isnt it!!

i think the seek times are amazing from what i was told from a person who using 4 x 2gb Kingston 100x CF cards on it on Raid 0
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top