Replace your hard drive with Compact Flash cards

[jetsetter]

This family of unique CF-IDE Hard Drive Adapters is designed to enable one or two Compact Flash (CFI/II) media to be used as direct replacement for the 2.5" IDE hard drive. As a result, any equipment, such as Notebook computer, that uses a 2.5" IDE hard drive can be easily converted to use the low power and shock resistant CF media. Once installed, the CF appears as an ordinary hard drive to any OS and can be configured as a boot device. The Dual CF-IDE Hard Drive Adapter contains a second CF slot for the slave position of the IDE channel, allowing increased storage capacity with the same low power consumption and solid state benefits of the CF card.

Key Features

Enable Compact Flash (CF) to be used like ordinary 2.5" IDE hard drive
Compatible with CFI/II™
Choice of single slot or dual slots CF adapter
Drive access LED
IDE interface
Mini 44-pin IDE male connector (2.5" IDE hard drive connector)
Bootable
Compatible* with DOS, Windows 3.1, NT4, 98SE, Me, 2000, XP, Vista, Mac or Linux
Supports DMA and Ultra DMA modes (only on flash media card with such features)
*Media must be in the device during boot up. Media is not hot swappable

For fast boot performance, we recommend installing in the master slot with CF that supports fixed disk mode. Also due to limitation of the BIOS on most of the Notebook computers, only CF with removable disk mode can be detected in the slave slot.

http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...ad44midecf.asp
(photos at the site)

With higher capacity cards coming out this could be a cheaper way to get into the solid state hard drive world.

[NecroJoe]

Am I correct in seeing that it only holds 1 or two cards? So...at most you get a...what, a 16GB drive (I think the biggest is 8GB at the moment, right?) Once you get that big, though, the drives start costing more than standard drives...

[thedguy]

Price per gig may suck, but the battery life and speed increases would make up for it. Current laptop drives use up to 5 watts, and idle at half a watt, CF cards max will use half a watt. Their overall speed is slower, but random access kick ass and their burst speed is very close to their regular transfer speeds.

I've been playing with the idea of converting my Thinkpad's hd over to compact flash I only need about 6-8 gigs anyhow. The Dual one kicks ass, nice find jetsetter.

[jetsetter]

Originally Posted by NecroJoe

Am I correct in seeing that it only holds 1 or two cards? So...at most you get a...what, a 16GB drive (I think the biggest is 8GB at the moment, right?) Once you get that big, though, the drives start costing more than standard drives...

There are larger capacity cards in development. What is expensive right now is the large capacity solid state hard drives that are just coming out. Computers equiped with them cost quite a bit.

[geeman]

16GB is the biggest CF card I could find. Two of those would cost in total of 500€. It's a lot for just 32GB of HDD space, even when you consider the advantages. In comparasion you could get 160GB drive for your laptop which would cost you only 130€ (5 times more space for 1/5 of the price). The prices need to drop a lot and the capacity must also increase before switching over becomes reasonable.

[jetsetter]

I just went on Ebay and found 8GB Compactflash cards for $75-80 and 16GB cards for $200-300. Remember that the theoretical maximum for these cards is 137 GB.

[thedguy]

Originally Posted by geeman

16GB is the biggest CF card I could find. Two of those would cost in total of 500€. It's a lot for just 32GB of HDD space, even when you consider the advantages. In comparasion you could get 160GB drive for your laptop which would cost you only 130€ (5 times more space for 1/5 of the price). The prices need to drop a lot and the capacity must also increase before switching over becomes reasonable.

While you may be different, my uses only require about 10 gigs. I don't need to carry my entire music collection or a large movie collection on my laptop. For those occasions where I do need/want my movies or music, I could throw my laptop HD into a cheap enclosure that runs on usb.

[NecroJoe]

How much faster would this speed up a typical Windows laptop boto sequence? How much of this is dependant on hd speed?

[thedguy]

Hardly if any. Part of the problem is because windows has a certain lag built into it (I've timed well tweaked p3 systems to well tweaked core 2 duo systems and they'll have near identical boot times). If you watch a system with a clean install of windows, you can see there is a point during boot where there is no HD access, windows is just sitting (I forget exactly what it's doing, but it is something).

The main speed benefit will be access small files and random access stuff. Streaming something, or copying a big file will be slower on a CF card. Opening an app like firefox or wordpad would more than likely come up quicker than on a regular HD.

Think of it like this, CF is like a Lotus Elise, changes direction quickly (random access times), and accelerates like few others (burst transfer rates), but doesn't have the top speed (constant speed transfers, like copying a 60 meg file).
A regular HD is more like a 600 hp Mercedes S-class with the top speed limiter removed, doesn't seem to accelerate as quick as the Elise, or change direction, but on a straight road it'll out run it.

Though the main benefit is really just the lower power draw, which is what I'm after. I keep my p3 800 laptop lean (only the necessities), and with a good chunk of ram. It boots in 30 seconds, about 12 if I use hibernate (which I use a lot). Firefox and thew few office apps I use for testing run excellently on it.

[RoamingGnome]

I've tried an 8GB CF in the past for shits-and-giggles to use as my OS drive and the performance was just not there (especially considering price). But I am really awaiting leaps in solid-state storage development. I'm tired of the spindle HDD's. I don't use laptops so power consumption is not the top of the list but noise, heat, size and speed is. A lightning quick 16GB SS drive would be perfect for OS. A 32-60G ok for many applications but with todays proliferation of music, video, HTPC's and alike, 1TB is not crazy anymore. The industry has a long way to go.

[jeffy777]

I think one of the greatest benefits of solid state drives is that you don't have to worry about the moving parts dying. One of the worst things in the world is to have a hard drive crap out on you, especially when it holds important work files that can't be replaced.

[the Interceptor]

The SSD technology is just coming up, but it's coming fast. I just read today that a 64GB SSD HDD costing 350€ is to be released within the month. A 160GB version for the same money will follow in the summer, accompanied by a cheaper 120GB version. Now, I don't see the point of changing to SSD yet unless I really need to, but in about a year or so, this will be superior in every way to the HDDs we know today:

- no noise
- no heat
- absolutely shock resistant
- much lower power consumption
- constant speed over the whole amount of storage space

In many terms it's not quite there yet, but we're getting there fast.

Regards
the Interceptor

[matt2000]

i would love to fill my PC with flash disks. can you image how fast a RAID 0 setup could be if you used 5 or 6 160Gb disks together. nearly 1Tb of storage with very fast read and write access 8)

i hope that 64Mb for 350 is true. ATM it costs £330 for a 32Mb, and if you take exchange rate into account, that's a ridiculous price