Using a Compact Flash as a Hard Drive.

[GoHack]

Hi,

For anyone interested, I'm testing a new piece of hardware that people who run laptops may be interested in, when it comes to extending the battery charge.

I came across this CF (Compact Flash) to hard drive adapter on the net that I bought.

The adapter is available in both an IDE and SATA formats..

I started thinking about it, especially w/the Solid State HD's now coming out, and went searching for one, and found them, in both formats.

As for the CF's, the 8 gb's are now affordable, and available as fast as 266x.

So I bought one of each.

I tried running a 2 gb (60x), which I had, and I was able to get Windows XP on, and ran, but slowly. I removed as many files as possible, using XPLite.

I then loaded the 8 gb (266x), and it's a lot faster, that's for sure.

Anyway, I got Windows XP Media Center Edition fully loaded on it w/no problems, and w/plenty of room to spare. Windows takes around 2 gb

Here's some benchmarks.
Benchmarks:
HD Tach 3.0.4.0

Burst Speed = 43.8 mb/sec
Access = 0.5 ms
Average Read = 40.3 mb/sec

Sandra Lite

Read Performance = 42 mb/sec
Random Access = 1 ms

Any other benchmarks that someone wants me to run?

This CF seems to be working pretty good. It's not super fast as a HD of course, but very tolerable. As the CF's get even faster, that can improve.

Oh, and I've been running on battery for an hour and half, and counting.

Hardware: An Alienware m5550 laptop w/a 2.0 GHz Core Duo cpu, 2 gb DDR2, and a Nvidia GO 7600 video.

Update: The laptop was still running after approximately two plus hrs, when I fell asleep. I'm lucky to normally get an hr or so, w/a regular HD installed. So there is an improvement using CF as a HD, at least w/my laptop. I realise that this is a general test, and not very accurate. All the battery saving features were also shut off.

Oh by the way, there's no measureable heat being given off, that I can feel. It takes energy to create the heat, so that is a sure indication of an energy saving feature of the CF as a HD.

If anyone can suggest a sure test for tesing battery life, I'll try it too.

http://www.addonics.com/support/user...e/adsahdcf.pdf CF to SATA adapter for $35.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820211164 8 gb (266x speed) Compact Flash for $92.99. A 16 gb is now available, but it's only a 40x.

Durability -Minimum 10,000 insertion/removal cycles

MTBF > 1,000,000 hours
.

 

[Liver]

Definitely something to look into. Looks like you are trail blazing. Keep us posted and good work. I was going to do that with a spare 8gig card that I had, but then ran outta time.

 

[mavalpha]

Definitely something to look into. Looks like you are trail blazing. Keep us posted and good work. I was going to do that with a spare 8gig card that I had, but then ran outta time.

You can also enable EWF to get more life out of your CF card. It does a lot to reduce write cycles to the flash, I believe largely by disabling a page file. It also makes your installed OS more static, meaning installing software/settings/etc takes more effort. This has been done with carputers for some time.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms913690.aspx

 

[GoHack]

You can also enable EWF to get more life out of your CF card. It does a lot to reduce write cycles to the flash, I believe largely by disabling a page file. It also makes your installed OS more static, meaning installing software/settings/etc takes more effort. This has been done with carputers for some time.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms913690.aspx

Thanks, I'll look into it.
.