CF-IDE adapter as SSD?

Hi, I'd like to ask if anyone has tried to use UDMA cf cards with CF-IDE adapter as hard drive replacement. I see there are mainly two kind of these adapters now, one from Addonics and one from Syba. I'd like to know if anyone has tried those, and what's your experience.

Thank you.

 

yes, I use them as SSD drives for building integrated systems for automation/Industrial equipment and routers. work fantastic for low use applications like a Linux box or a computerized controller but WAY too slow to be a practical HDD or SSD drive replacement.

they are also not rated for nearly as many read/write cycles as a proper drive as well, but for what I use them for they may write 10MB of data a day or have to boot a Linux distro every few months

 

I used a generic CF-PATA adapter with a 4GB, 300X Transcend CF on my old TC4200 for more than a year and a half with Windows XP. Fairly heavy daily internet use and I never had any problems... heck it was faster than the old 40GB spinner it used to have.

I think my only concern would be that you look for an SLC CF card... I tried upgrading a nominally faster (600X) MLC CF and the performance was utter crap. Probably helps on the longevity side of things too.

 

thanks for the opinions. My thoughts originally was the following. Now most SSD only provide 2, 3 years of warranty, and they are quite new and probably will take another 2 to 3 years to be a very stable and mature product ( and cheap).
Meanwhile, most high-end CF cards provide lifetime warranty, so I can change a new one whenever they broken. And I have a DLSR camera which can also use these CF cards, so if it's not good on notebook I can always use them on cameras.
I just didn't have much experience with those adapter, don't know if they can handle that high speed cards that well. I saw a Transcend 400X card recently, not very expensive, from some benchmard test, it can do fairly well for its price. If I want to use very fast CF card, the price will be even higher than SSD drives, then there is no point.
My nb is T40 so only take IDE drives and IDE SSDs are quite old type and I'm not willing to invest into those right now. Maybe a good adaptor and good CF card will give this old pal some new life, temporarily before it's replaced by newer Thinkpad.

Thanks.

 

hey I would say give it a go, it never hurts especially if you have a use for the CF card elsewhere

 

Yeah, I'm now more and more convinced myself I should try this way to do an upgrade, even though the same amount of money could probably give me another 320GB IDE notebook HD instead of this (adapter+16GB) set up.

I'm dreaming about the possible reading speed increase, faster system startup, application loading.
My concern is I don't know which of the Addonics or Syba adapters works better? Or perform similar, when their price is quite different.
And for CF cards, most reviews are related with camera read/write speed, which mostly resulting from files around 10 MB. There is no such review to compare those cards when they are directly connected to IDE bus. Theoretically they should work fine since it's only a change of the connection form, the pins are the same. But from one source, a lot of cards were tested with a bunch of different readers, and they perform really differently, so hard to predict how they will do on my expected setup.

I'm thinking to do a kind of review for myself, with such adapters and different CF cards, to install a system on them and see how they work. Just don't have that much money for all the cards.

 

The adapter itself isn't going to make much of a difference, it's the card itself. The sequential read/write speeds that you get from cameras and more typical CF usage are probably not representative of the performance you're going to get running an OS off of the card.

It's like those JMicron solid state drives that plagued the market in the stone age of SSDs... high sequential reads and writes, poor random writes, and pretty much abysmal performance. Morale of the story: don't pay attention to sequential speeds.

 

Going with a CF card will not give you improved performance over a 7200rpm 2.5" mechanical hard drive.

If you're looking for compact storage, silent storage, or shock-resistant storage, then what you are suggesting would work. But if you're looking for speed, then it wouldn't be worth your time. The only real way to get speed increases over a mechanical hard drive in the areas of system startup and application load times is to get a hybrid drive (Seagate Momentus XT) or a true SSD. CF cards prioritized storage capacity and "good enough" speeds inthe devices for which they were intended. They were never designed to prioritize speed above all else, the way that SSD's are.

 

my T40 only have IDE, so all the SATA things won't work for me, or need to go through converters, which will slow down a bit. So I'm only eyeing on IDE drives.
I feel the IDE SSDs should be quite old and probably don't have any new technology there, so maybe not good choices. 7200rpm drives from that age seems don't have much advantage over 5400s. Or is there a huge difference? WD's blue drives seems are quite good at that time, can compare with 7200s.

 

Actually, RunCore makes a line of fairly decent Indilinx-based PATA SSDs. Obviously the Indilinx Barefoot controller is going to be capped by the speed of the PATA bus in sequential read and write, but you can still take advantage of relatively high random read and write speeds.

They're not cheap compared to modern SATA SSDs, but I think they're a relatively good value per GB storage space and per MB/s transfer speed compared to CF.

Honestly, I think the best solution here is to hold out 'til you get a SATA capable laptop.

 

When using SSD or CF cards , should I disable pagefiles ? and any other services frequently read the drive should I disable first?

 

You are right about IDE SSD's - Transcend does have some drives out there, but they are relatively slow. I wouldn't advise throwing money towards those.

As for 7200rpm drives... well, I have to say that your assumptions are wrong. There is considerable performance improvement over 5400rpm drives. If you're looking for a speed boost, you could go with a 7200rpm drive.

Normally, I would advise people to get a 7200rpm drive without even hesitating. However, since you're on an older laptop running IDE, any money you spend on your current computer will not be able to be carried over. If your laptop is getting near end-of-life, then I would advise you to save money, and just spend it on whatever replacement laptop you buy after your current machine gets retired.

 

yeah, that's true. But it's not in the near future. And tired of the old HD, new softwares just put more presure on it. more temp files more page file reading. need to do defrag more frequently than before. Probably just get a new HD instead, will be much easier. but I'll check out how much I can get one of those runcore.

Thanks a lot.

 

Remember, any money you spend on IDE drives will not be able to be carried over to any other laptop. And since IDE is already dead, you won't be able to re-sell your IDE parts for much money.

I would seriously consider Commander Wolf's advise, and just save for a SATA-capable laptop. Any money you spend towards IDE / PATA will be wasted.

 

One thing you COULD do to "carry over" the IDE hard drive to your next new laptop would be to get an external USB enclosure in IDE flavor. IDE is plenty fast enough for any USB interface (2.0 that is), so you could always use that drive as a USB drive later on.