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    CF-28 Win XP Ramdrive

    Discussion in 'Panasonic' started by CF-28 Frankenstein, Aug 13, 2011.

  1. CF-28 Frankenstein

    CF-28 Frankenstein Notebook Geek

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    I've been reading the posts in the CF-29 forum because my company provided work computer is a CF-29 1.6Ghz 256MB RAM. I'm not allowed to play with this one so I spend my efforts on my CF-28 (but I will be doing the 2GB memory upgrade with or without their blessing).

    Anyway, I came across an article in the CF-29 forum about using the factory SD card slot for a Ramdrive and it got me thinking.....

    I have a PCMCIA CF card reader installed in my CF-28. It fits in the top slot nicely and allows me to keep the bay cover closed. More likely than not it would also fit in the "hidden" PCMCIA slot. I slipped a 1GB CF card in there I had lying around, formatted it FAT32, then went into Control Panel.

    Click on System | Advanced | Performance-Settings | Advanced | Virtual Memory-Change. On this screen I disabled the page file for C: drive and set up a new Page File for the CF drive. I then rebooted.

    Bottom line: Is it faster? I don't have any software to test benchmarks or anything but not swapping data to the hard disk has got to improve speed somewhat for parts I just had lying around.

    Any thoughts?
     
    CF-28 Frankenstein, Aug 13, 2011
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  2. KLonsdale

    KLonsdale Notebook Evangelist

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    I won't hurt anything, you may notice a small increase in speed as you are taking some of the load off of the main drive, but with you using fat 32 for the CF-card the computer i/o for the card will be slower than had you formatted the drive with NTSF.
     
    KLonsdale, Aug 14, 2011
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  3. CF-28 Frankenstein

    CF-28 Frankenstein Notebook Geek

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    "NTFS" is not one of my choices......
    FAT32, FAT, and exFAT are all that pop up under the format menu....
     
    CF-28 Frankenstein, Aug 16, 2011
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  4. mnementh

    mnementh Crusty Ol' TinkerDwagon

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    Your bottleneck will be the I/O subsystem; nothing on your computer that you can connect to is faster than the HDD (except the RAM, of course). The PCMCIA bus is limited to ATA-66 speeds; while your HDD IDE controller is twice that at ATA-133. I suspect your SSD will prove to be MUCH faster, even on that bus.

    mnem<~~~Dwagon on the Short Bus~~~<<<
     
    mnementh, Aug 17, 2011
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  5. KLonsdale

    KLonsdale Notebook Evangelist

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    Now that I think about it I believe I formatted mine in my Win 7 desktop computer. If you use an SDHC card ensure that your PCMCIA card will support an SDHC card, if not the computer will freeze up on you requiring a hard reboot. I got a card that said it supported SDHC but when I put an 8gb SDHC card in the computer it would lockup and refuse to reboot until I removed the card. The reason I tried it is that I am using an SSD and wanted to use a SD card as my page file to cut down the writing to the SSD.

    Since it did not work the way I wanted I quit using it for that and use it for ready boost on my Win 7 desktop.
     
    KLonsdale, Aug 17, 2011
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