xp on cf to ide

i recently bought an 8GB sandisk extreme IV card from ebay for £31 and a cf to ide adapter for only £2. Not bad eh? an 8GB 40mb/s ssd for only £33!
I however have read that there can be some issues when using an cf as an internal hard drive such as the cf being recognized as 'removable,' another forum someone said they had to flash (i think) theirs or something...
anyway what problems may come up in an xp install, and what are the solutions?
thanks

 

Slooooowww...

 

how is that slow?
thats faster than a 5400 and nearly as fast as a 7200rpm!

 

I bought a CF to SATA for $8. It worked for installing Linux on to a 8GB sandisk III, but when it came to boot up, it just hung at scanning the card for over 15 minutes and so I gave up and turned it off.
I guess the adaptor from Ebay was dodgy because it was from China and not an 'Addonics' make which costs around $40 or something.

edit: try install Linux before you try installing XP. you will save the hassle of having to use nlite for XP etc... to just find out that it wont work very well in the end.

 

With 0.1 ms access time of a CF capable of 40mb/s constant read speed, I wouldn't call that slow.

 

I suppose that speed is fast compared to 5400/7200rpm HDs of low disk densities. For example, a 320GB 7200rpm HD would have an average write speed of around 60MBps, whereas a 60GB one would average at around 30MBps. Of course, for a compact flash card, 40MBps is a very nice speed.

 

do the cf to ide adapters sold on ebay very cheap have a high failure rate? does anyone know of any adapters sold by any uk website that will must likely work... just worrried that the adapter i bought might not work

 

You could try the US addonics website, they ship worldwide.

 

Actually comparing to what's available today, the Samsung 320GB 5400 and the Hitachi 7K200 200GB have the highest transfer speeds, both averaging about 53MBps. To compare, a 160GB 5400 is only 37MBps average, and a Hitachi 120GB 7200RPM averages about 42MBps, and even a 250GB 5400 averages around 43-47MBps depending on manufacturer. Doesn't matter if it's SATA or IDE, both interfaces don't affect much to performance except the availability of product capacities and models.

So in otherwords, it's not a huge difference in speed like most users are saying above. Infact, I've seen CF cards capable of 41-43MBps, so taking into consideration of the CF card having the lowest possible access times of 0.1ms compared to the fastest 2.5" 7K200 of 14.7ms, I would say that you will definitely notice a much faster and snappier system if you were to use fast CF cards to replace the system harddrive.

On this note, I have seen a Dual CF to 44 pin IDE, which means you can install upto 2 CF cards, so imagine two 32GB Ultra fast 333X cards at a total of 64GB. I would think this would be much cheaper than SSDs at 64GB capacity. A more affordable solution is actually 16GB 333X cards(that costs about $60) which is a much lower price ratio compared to most SSDs out there at the same capacity.

 

basically what i want to know is will or won't this probably work:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/CF-to-44-pins...ryZ41994QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad44midecf.asp
This one will be more trustworthy.
many people who have ordered one on ebay from China have gotten dodgy none-working ones.

 

OMG OMG I must reply! I have been looking for info on this one problem. I have 2 16 gig CF and the dual cf adapter installed on a hp pavilion laptop (with 256 ram) I bought last year from wal mart. It will hang if I use a pagefile, on log on. I think someone had that issue in a previous post. But If you go in under safe mode or hold shift down while booting up you can get in and turn pagefile.sys off. So my problem is: Whenever I use windows blinds combined with using internet browsers such as IE7 and Mozilla Firefox and using Yahoo all at the same time, the processes that I use will shut down. For example, I have loaded 3 programs, yahoo messenger, IE (or mozilla) and windows blinds. 1 of those 3 randomly shut off. So I have to use task manager to end the Explorer.exe task before I load another .exe.

How do I enable pagefile.sys on a removable disk drive since thats what windows recognizes the CF cards as? I have looked it up on google, but no one has posted a successful attempt at it. But there is 1 thread that said there is a registry hack.

Also: The speed of the disk is just slightly slower than the iRam because CF Adapter doesnt connect with SATA. (I have a desktop with Vista installed on 4gig iRam partition)

I just found this wep page from addonics on google. http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq-bootcf.asp It tells you to just leave the pagefile off forever. But is there really limited write times on these disks? I thought everyone debunked that myth?

 

Hey I figured out how to make all CF look as if they were fixed media and am able to use the pagefile on the second CF to reduce read/write on the first. That was my problem. If the drive shows up in windows as removable media. Stuff just doesnt work; XP wont boot. But, and its a huge but! You install windows on the CF, boot into XP and immediately update to the Microdrive drivers, which emulates a CF Fixed disk. Here is the drivers youll need: http://www.google.com/search?q=xpfi...s=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a
Download those drivers if you have the same problem I did! Oh and use returnil virtual system with your CF. It helps with the read/write issues

 

I got one off ebay, it's okay, it's just a dumb circuit board, no logic. The IDE adaptors should be reliable. The sata adaptor however, has some logic on it to convert IDE to SATA, and the first one i bought on ebay didn't work.

 

Where Can I find a 16GB 333X card for $60?