Usually I blog to inform, evangelize, entertain, or express my opinions. In this UltraMobileGeek.com article, I waste my time and money so you don't have to. With that, I welcome you to my evaluation of CompactFlash cards as drop-in replacements for hard drives using the Addonics adapter.The device I ordered was US $29 and shipping was $8.90 for FedEx ground. It was ordered on April 4, shipped on April 6, and arrived on April 11. I purchased the "two slot" variety, hoping I could use one CF card for storage and another for a page file and hibernate area.
First we'll cover the device and installation in this video:
The unit was tested with three different CF cards: A PQI 100x 8GB card, a SanDisk Ultra II 2GB card, and a Transcend 120X 2GB card. Right away, some advice left in my comments from another excellent UMPC blogger (JKK) rang true: The SanDisk card, in either slot, prevented the system from booting. The error: Operating System Not Found. It seems that compatible cards are a kind of hit-or-miss.
The second disappointment was apparent quickly: For some reason, I was having problems when I had a card in the 2nd slot. While my POST screen showed the presence of a primary and secondary drive, Windows sat at the "loading screen" forever and never passed it. Windows would enter Safe Mode and I was able to partition and format the second drive, but never booted into a normal environment. I am going to blame my BIOS for this: Clearly the UMPC BIOS was never intended to have a secondary drive attached. In the BIOS configuration screens, it only showed the presence of a Primary IDE drive even though POST showed both.
Since there was no way to get Windows to install on a 2GB card from my restore DVDs, I was stuck using the 8GB card exclusively. Once in that environment, Windows felt a bit sluggish. Testing results follow:
Battery Life Test:
Test method: Using the standard 3 cell battery, I ran Battery Eater Pro in "idle" mode, started Windows Media Player with a looping playlist of six music videos (stored on the desktop,) turned the volume off, set the power savings to "always on," disconnected all USB devices, and let it run until it automatically entered "sleep." 40 GB Toshiba drive: 94 minutes of video playback until sleep.
Adapter with 8GB PQI card: 102 minutes.
While the difference is only 8 minutes, that test scenario was heavy on CPU power and display backlighting. 8 minutes from a 94 minute base is an additional 8.5%.
Performance Test:
Test method: Used DiskSpeed 32 with the AC plugged in.
CompactFlash card: 13,462 KB/sec average
HDD: 26,164 KB/sec average
The CompactFlash card I chose averaged half the transfer rate of the hard drive.
Summary:
Pro:
- Smaller and lighter than IDE hard drives.
- More shock resistant.
- Slightly increasted battery life.
- Slower (depending on card chosen)
- Much higher cost per GB
- Lower storage ceiling.
If you really want a solid state UMPC, it's best to buy an SSD drive intended for computing use and not attempt to use CF cards. In paraphrasing the advice from JKK, you can't expect any old CompactFlash card to perform comparable to a real SSD hard drive. Companies like SuperTalent offer drop-in IDE replacements that are meant to be used in this environment.
12 comments:
Did you have DMA enabled? Most older CF cards run in PIO mode which is slow and CPU intensive. Did you test speed of other cards too? I wonder what speed can the transcend 120x one do with DMA enabled (preferably the 8GB one).
I'm asking because PIO mode has theoretical limit of 16MB/s which look like your result numbers.
also 100x card means 15MB/s, this may mean the card may not support DMA at all. There is nothing mentioned about DMA support on PQI site. On Transcend site it says DMA is supported (unless you buy the xxx-P model which means PIO).
Very interesting. I thought that to use this adapter you need to exactly cards and then the adapter would trick the OS to think that it´s using just one Card.
That´s the way SSD works. You have multiple cards added into just one partition or drive.
I think the slow speed has to do with your choice of CompactFlash card and the adaptor.
With a Sandisk Extreme IV and the Sandisk Extreme Firewire reader, this user achieved speeds of 38 MB/sec, significantly faster than the hard disk:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-8462
good card benchmark site
http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/index.html
they have numbers for DMA capable CF cards too
Sandisk Extreme user - you're not using this ide adaptor or a similar one to test your sandisk extreme cf card so your comment is totally irrelavant.
Not really, it proves that a good CF card isn't the limiting factor here. That's down to the adapter being used, probably because it's not doing DMA...
I buy some CF Card,IDE-CF,SATA-CF adapter from a china factory , and find it good quality and lower price,so i want share with others my feels.Especially,the IDE-CF only 1.98USD,and SATA TO CF,the same like addonice,but the price just need 9.9USD
Websit: http：//www.soarland.com
That card he used probably maxed out at PIO 4. Actually, even today there are only a handful of CF cards that enter into the UDMA doman. And, those cards, such as the SanDisk Extreme IV have achieved 40MB/sec transfers. However, one does not use a CF card as HDD unless they are intending to save battery life. Thats what I was interested about. An 8% gain is not worth the cost of a CF card over a traditional 2.5¨ HDD.
Hi, a few remarks:
First, using a CF or HDD as a slave IDE (second port
of your adapter) on a laptop won't work most of the
time due to very limited bios expecting a cd/dvd
reader on the second slot.
Second, 120X CF is just to slow. You need at least
260X to get a fast disk (42mb/s).
Thirst, most CF are marked as removable disk, and
Windows will refuse to install itself on it. Still
SanDisk CF can be flashed using a tool they give away.
Infinitely waiting at the welcome screen is typical behavior for windows when installed on removable media (many CFs are). You can break out of it with CTRL-ALT-DEL, then disable virtual memory and Windows will boot fine next time.
www.dusko-lolic.from.hr
Post a Comment