Compact Flash - RAID 0

We all like how well the Z11 performs with its RAID 0 x 4 configuration.
I notice that Photofast makes a compact flash device that holds 4 micro sdhc cards and runs them as RAID 0 stripes.

It is the Photofast cr-7200:
Photofast CR-7200 CompactFlash Adapter Runs Four microSDs In RAID - Photofast CR-7200 - Gizmodo



It is supposed to sell for about $30. If one fills it with 16GB micro sdhc cards, this should give a pretty fast 64GB SSD for a very reasonable price.

Does anyone know who might sell it. My google search failed to find a vendor.

 

I found this in ebay. May be you can ask him/her if the CR-7200 is available?

PhotoFast microSD microSDHC to CF Type1 ADAPTER CR-7100 - eBay (item 390141932544 end time May-11-10 02:10:19 PDT)

 

Thanks,

We'll see what he says.

I also sent dvnation a similar message.

 

That's interesting, do these micro sdhc cards encounter the same sort of issues as SSDs requiring TRIM/GC?

 

yes. They are still flash memory.

 

Did you ever find a vendor, Oscar2? These adapters seem to be quite elusive! Although the CR-7100 (single microSD) is, in comparison, pretty widely available.

 

I looked around quite a bit and emailed some of the vendors but was not able to find them. It looks like it was announced but nobody ever imported it.

 

Here you go. Why not just get a fast CF card, it'll be cheaper and faster. The goal of this is to RAID up slow usds to make it as fast as a fast CF.

Geek Stuff 4 U - Your best Japanese Gadget Store - Four Slot MicroSDHC to CF Converter PhotoFast CR-7200

 

I tried a couple of cf cards. I have an adapter that you can plug a cf into it then use it as an ide drive. But the cf cards weren't that fast. and they exhibited those long delay times that come with flash memory writes when you don't have trim.

As far as the link that you are showing, that's the cr-7200 that got me started looking in the first place. I don't believe that one is available to actually buy anywhere (at least no one seemed to want to sell ME one!)

 

hmm... seems to be a silly question, but which sony laptop support CF card?

 

I have a Sony Tx770 with the mini-ide hard drive interface. Its an old, slow laptop that I thought I might breath some life into with a flash disk. Unfortunately most flash drives are not mini-ide and the few that are cost $$$.

The 4 way raid0 cr-7200 promised to give fast access but was not available. and the single cf card adapter that turns any cf into an ide drive, proved they (at least the ones I tried) are too slow to use as the main system drive (fine for just file storage though).

The dedicated ssd hard drives are optimized differently than the cf cards which are designed more for storing and retrieving pictures (fast sequential access).

 

Most are, because the largest buying group for CF cards are photographers who want fast sequential reads and writes.
However, some "manufacturing grade" cards are optimized better for random access. Unfortunately, they're more pricey, and also don't include the largest CF cards.

This has become not only a problem for CFs, but drives in general and SDDs in particular. Uninformed users look for the biggest numbers, which is going to be sequential read speed. Never mind that this isn't the bottleneck for computer use, and that a drive with half the sequential read speed of another can be much faster for normal use, if it has been tweaked for lower latency, faster random access speed and improving worst-case instead of average and burst speeds.

 

what he said...

(a succinct and precise description of the issue at hand)