compact flash card - opinion/expertise requested

bwh1969 · 2009-03-01 19:16:42

I recently wanted to add additional space to my laptop and want to get some fast medium at a reasonable price and a CF card in the PCMCIA slot seems like a good option. I currently have an IDE SSD (MLA -slower type and I have only seen write speeds of maybe 18 MBPS - read speeds are really high) and am running Chakra Live (Arch live distro) from the SSD as a "save session" setup. It works very well and fast because it only needs to read the drive to load it into the ramdisk. I also use Virtualbox for Win XP when I need it, and I eed a read/write medium capable of faster speeds than my somewhat cheap-o internal SSD. I want to clone my virtual hard drive for XP on something faster, since it works as an read/write OS when operating and it bogs down pretty bad on the internal SSD. I don't want a USB dongle just hanging out of my laptop. Things get bumped and such and I don't need something falling out or getting pulled out when I am moving about.

I have a 32 bit pcmcia CF reader that came with some generic CF card "free" (you know - ebay) and the transfer speed is really slow (3 mbps). I also have an SD card adapter for it and when I put a "newer/faster" SDHC in the adapter and then put it in the 32 bit CF reader, the transfer is pretty fast (seems about 4 times faster). That is a route I can go but it still is no faster than my internal SSD.

The opinion I am seeking is that if I spend the extra for a really fast CF card (266x - up to 40 MBPS sequential read/write with UDMA support): Would I be wasting money on getting a 266x as opposed to a 133x (about 20 MBPS) in my situation? $45 vs $20.

rayjgu3 · 2009-03-01 19:33:04

yes you can go through all that & well i wouldnt.
what i done is upgraded by hard drive from 5400 rpm to a 7200 rpm now my laptop moves quite a bit faster.
you could still setup your Chakra Live partition on the hard drive itself although it wouldnt speed up your D.E. it wiould probably speed up your boot time. but your OS's would definately see speed increase you can pick up 320 GB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM for about $100 usd
which is fairly inexpensive.

.:B:. · 2009-03-01 19:58:40

A good 5400 RPM disc saves your battery and does not perform that bad compared to a 7200 laptop drive. If you value your battery time, get a 5400 RPM HD.

Judging from your story you seem to have an entry-level SSD, and probably a similar laptop (netbook?). And most netbooks don't do well on the battery side either .

bwh1969 · 2009-03-02 02:46:21

I appreciate your replies.

The original drive was a Western Digital 5400 RPM drive in my Acer Aspire 1.8 GHz Athlon laptop and worked respectably well. I have managed with the SSD and the Chakra live to extend battery life to about 50% more. Live distros do their work in RAM (and I have 1.5GB) and only read the drive and with no spinning, it really rocks.

CF card is attractive because it;s power usage would be minimal and fits in the machine.

Yes, it is an entry level SSD but cost a third of the cost of the faster classification. I am experiencing the cost of my thriftiness only when trying to run a virtal machine and wanted to "offload" the virtual drive to something that might even be slightly faster. I am only looking for a moderate gain in speed. There are name brand CF cards that are 8 GB in size that have up to 40 MBPS tested sequential read/write speeds for around $50 Others are half that with a max speed of 20 about the speed of my SSD but if it were not slower than I already had, it could still save a beating on my ssd (which still wasn't "cheap").

I don't know exactly what this means if I were attempting to use pcmcia as a drive, which mode would be used and will it take advantage of a possible 40 MBPS speed over a 20 MBPS speed card? I can't find definitions of what each mode is.

CardBus (32 bit burst mode)
* Byte mode: 33 Mbytes/sec
* Word mode: 66 Mbytes/sec
* DWord mode: 132 Mbytes/sec

lilsirecho · 2009-03-02 15:26:39

My system uses CF UDMA cards (adata 266x) and I find them advantageous when using them in raid0 primarily for storage. A triple raid0 runs at 137MB/sec sequential read and I have no idea what the write speed is.

This is desktop experience with Intel 945 machine.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-03-01 19:16:42

compact flash card - opinion/expertise requested

#2 2009-03-01 19:33:04

Re: compact flash card - opinion/expertise requested

#3 2009-03-01 19:58:40

Re: compact flash card - opinion/expertise requested

#4 2009-03-02 02:46:21

Re: compact flash card - opinion/expertise requested

#5 2009-03-02 15:26:39

Re: compact flash card - opinion/expertise requested

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