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Poor man's solid state?

R

Ratman6161

Senior member
But, consider this:

40-pin IDE to Compact Flash Adapter

Along with this:

32GB Compact Flash (CF) Flash Card

If you don't feel like following the links, the first item is a little card with an IDE connector and a compact flash card slot. The second item is a 32 GB compact flash card.

I've seen people asking about using various flash media as a solid state drive, but the drawback was always the USB interface. But using this adapter, the compact flash card should be seen as an IDE drive. What do you think?

Edit: here is another possibility: SATA to Compact Flash Adapter

Only problem with that one is its $50 so its a more expensive experiment than the other one.
 
you can buy the SATA to CF for 30$, gougeegg just takes 50$ for it, cause its gougeegg...

The question that must be asked is... why? What are the benefits?

Due to the clunky convertor, and the fact it uses v2 of the CF interface it is gonna be VERY slow. Slower then any HDD.
And due to the conversion circuitry it is not AS power efficient as a full SSD HDD. But then again, there are SSD HDD with conversion circuitry built in... It really all depends.

It will be light and very small though. So maybe plugging one of those directly to the motherboard to make a server or a render/DC farm might make sense.
 
to me, not as much sense as a small cheap usb memstick and a boot/drive server (or full PXE server) for what you are discussing, taltamir.
 
Originally posted by: taltamir
you can buy the SATA to CF for 30$, gougeegg just takes 50$ for it, cause its gougeegg...

The question that must be asked is... why? What are the benefits?

Due to the clunky convertor, and the fact it uses v2 of the CF interface it is gonna be VERY slow. Slower then any HDD.
And due to the conversion circuitry it is not AS power efficient as a full SSD HDD. But then again, there are SSD HDD with conversion circuitry built in... It really all depends.

It will be light and very small though. So maybe plugging one of those directly to the motherboard to make a server or a render/DC farm might make sense.
Click to expand...

Offhand, I'd be interested in looking at this, even if it is slow, if only it could be really quiet for not a lot of greenbacks. Mount it read-only, and I don't care how long it takes to boot.
 
Read only might be an option.
I would not use CF for read/write as a primary HD.
They have limited write cycles and using it as a primary drive will seriously shorten its life.
 
Originally posted by: jaqie
to me, not as much sense as a small cheap usb memstick and a boot/drive server (or full PXE server) for what you are discussing, taltamir.
Click to expand...

True. I wanted to try that myself but for my ZFS server I need either solaris or nexenta...
Solaris requires a min of 8GB
Nexenta should require 250MB... but the installer always fails on a USB thumb drive install. (due to MULTIPLE bugs in the installer in regards to USB thumb drives)

Originally posted by: Modelworks
Read only might be an option.
I would not use CF for read/write as a primary HD.
They have limited write cycles and using it as a primary drive will seriously shorten its life.
Click to expand...

So what? it is meant to be used. It breaks, you replace it. HDD also break...

Originally posted by: degibson
Originally posted by: taltamir
you can buy the SATA to CF for 30$, gougeegg just takes 50$ for it, cause its gougeegg...

The question that must be asked is... why? What are the benefits?

Due to the clunky convertor, and the fact it uses v2 of the CF interface it is gonna be VERY slow. Slower then any HDD.
And due to the conversion circuitry it is not AS power efficient as a full SSD HDD. But then again, there are SSD HDD with conversion circuitry built in... It really all depends.

It will be light and very small though. So maybe plugging one of those directly to the motherboard to make a server or a render/DC farm might make sense.
Click to expand...

Offhand, I'd be interested in looking at this, even if it is slow, if only it could be really quiet for not a lot of greenbacks. Mount it read-only, and I don't care how long it takes to boot.
Click to expand...

The cool factor is definitely there... and so is the silence factor for an ultra cheap person...

The most useful thing about these is that you can use them in iPods and the like instead of the regular HDD. Those drives are "fast enough" for music. And they improve battery life, and should do away with jigger issues if you are running or something.
 
Originally posted by: Ratman6161
I've seen people asking about using various flash media as a solid state drive, but the drawback was always the USB interface. But using this adapter, the compact flash card should be seen as an IDE drive. What do you think?
Click to expand...

It's cool, especially as you have UDMA support on both the CF and the IDE adapter. However, the card itself could be faster -- some are advertised as "266x" and higher instead of just "133x" -- this is an element in the difference between USB and IDE/SATA -- USB will cap it at around 30 MB/s sequential, but IDE/SATA can go higher.

I've seen a "266x" CF bench around 40-45 MB/s sequential. The system was very zippy. However, most CF cards, esp. the inexpensive ones, are not UDMA compatible, and these can turn out to be noticeably slower.

I've also had some issues with data corruption during/after re-boot. This problem apparently went away when I turned off write caching at the OS level.
 
That's an awesome idea, but why pay so much for a 32GB card? You can get exactly the same card in 16GB form for $70, which is plenty for windows, plus all the "normal" apps most of us use. And if you match it up with thar IDE adapter, it will cost less than $100 total. I don't know about you, but I'd sure hate to spend >$175 for a failed experiment.
 
Only way I could see this as being feasible, is to run a RAID array. Those CF drives are going to fail much faster than a hard drive.

May consider having the page file on a hard drive to lower the number of reads/writes.

RAID would help compensate for the transfer rates too.

Probably RAID 5 (or 6, if available), that way when one drive (or two) fails on you, you can just rebuild the array.
 
Most of the CF cards are not all that fast. Plus, you lose any internal caching or queuing capabilities that a real SSD controller (even the shitty Jmicron chip) has. I've seen lots of read-only projects that did this successfully, but it seems like kind of a waste already even with present SSD prices. I don't think you will be able to get better performance than the Jmicron drives, and it won't be all that much cheaper at the end of the day. You'll also likely have less lifetime on the setup as CF cards are usually lower-grade flash chips than what they use in SSDs and have a lower write cycle limit.
 
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