Compact Flash Raid

[SnowyEnigma]

Is there a pci card that can take 4 or more Compact flash cards and put them on raid 5? Like you have a PCI card that has 4 CF connectors on them for the cards. Something like this but in HD form? like you have an internal Raid of 4 cf cards so you can compete with a normal HD and run absolutly silent. With 2 gig CF cards so cheep, it would be possible to make an 8 Gig CF drive for under 600 bucks!

 

[yelo333]

Problem is that CF cards wear out fast when used for those sort of purposes. I have seen solutions that utilize a backup battery, the 5volt standby power, and regular ram chips. that seems to me even faster, and more reliable, assuming that backup-battery kicks in properly, and doesn't wear out/tells you when it needs replacing.

 

[SnowyEnigma]

What about those SCSI or ATA flash drives that go upwards to 80 gigs. How do they manage to not wear out? Do they use some sort of special/different solid state chips?

 

[sunase]

Well CF is pin compatible with IDE, so you can just get adapters that will let you connect the CF cards to a standard IDE raid card. Last time I was looking at this stuff, though, I think I remember seeing it mentioned that CF doesn't support DMA, only PIO. So that might be yet another bite out of performance...

 

[vetteguy]

Another thing to consider (if you were thinking of using Windows RAID) is the disks have to be converted to dynamic, and you can't convert removable media to dynamic under XP/2000/2003.