45MB/s is as fast as any hard drive you’re likely to find in a ultra mobile PC so folks, consider this Transcend 300x card very fast indeed! It’s CF 4.1 compliant [PDF] and it’s got ECC (error correction) support. In something like the Everun S6S with the supplied CF card adaptor, it would be perfect and probably a lot faster than the internal on-board flash. At 229 Euro for the 16Gb version though, its certainly not a cheap option but I’ve found the 8GB version online for 80 Euros so I’ve gone ahead and ordered one. I’m looking forward to testing it with the Everun to see how fast it is and am even thinking of running an OS on it in the Q1 Ultra. Elmstrom, a member on the portal here, has already tried a similar project with a similar card and he reports "A lot more responsive system." After a bit of research, it’s clear that the Transcend CF cards up to 266x have wear-leveling support which is very important if you want to use it as an OS drive otherwise otherwise swap/pagefiles can burn a ‘hole’ in the card very quickly. Unfortunately, there’s no data sheet yet for the 300x card so its possible that it doesn’t actually have wear-levelling. There’s only one way to find out!
Technical details: Transcend
Source: Golem.de (German)
hmm, i recall reading about a ide drive adapter that could take 3-4 CF cards…
bingo, found it on engadget:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/centurys-sata-adapter-supports-3-cf-cards-cheap-ssds-for-all/
Hi there Chippy, amazing work you guys do keeping us all informed and such. I’ve been doing a lot of research with CF – sata drives, the addonics website offers a great tutorial that can be found here:
http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq-bootcf.asp
I’ve got my 8 gig 300x transcend on order from mydigitaldiscount.com as they seem to have the best prices online (I’ve searched literally everywhere). I’m going to be putting mine in the HP 2133 mini-note once I can order it in Canada. For now I’ll be testing using an IDE adapter from ebay in my Acer aspire (aka junk, but gotta work with what you have lol). I’d be really interested in hearing your review and findings on performance. If you can update me once you have those that’d be great. Once I have my 2133 I’ll do some performance testing as well. Important thing to remember with CF (I’m sure you already know this) remember to turn off the windows XP paging file to limit writes to the drive and increase it’s life. Cheers
A small fly to your ointment, are you sure the Everun CF reader can give you that throughput?
q4scjtg
Thats a great article. Thanks for the link.
It might take some days for the adaptor to arrive as its only on 2-3days delivery so I dont expect to be doing anything until next week but i’ll be sure to keep you updated.
Voicoder. Yes, its highly probably that the Everun can’t throuput that much but if it’s as fast as the 22MB/s hard disk, its going to be faster than the flash on the motherboard. The main aim is to test it in the Q1 Ultra though. If it works – as Elmstrom seems to have done – I might go for a 16GB version on the Q1 Ultra Premium (with 2GB and HSDPA of course). Ooooooooooh sweeeeeeet!
TSO, thanks for the link. I doubt it will fit a 5mm drive height bay tho.
Steve.
But I wonder if the BIOS will let you boot from a CF card? I just ordered a Lifebook u810, if it works that way, I may have to try that!
The BIOS shouldn’t see anything other than a HD.
The Everun can boot from the drive bay rather than flash if needed.
Steve.
Oh ok, btw, I found this 32gb 233x CF card on newegg.com ,may worth a look!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183191
I can only recomend playing around with this, its fun and “cheap”. But keep and eye out for a good deal, cause it seams price on CF cards is not a stable thing.
RiDATA, A-DATA : I can not find it can support UDMA transfer mode, except highest speed but low capacity (A-DATA Turbo serise, RiDATA Supreme serise)
Trnscend models can support UDMA mode as belows
133x 32GB $169 [TS32GCF133] no leveraging, 300x 16GB $230 [TS16GCF300] and leveraging at newegg
Latest model from Sandisk extreme IV can support UDMA 4, leveraging (?) and maximum capacity is 8GB only.
I agree to Elmstrom, SSD have higher function to use as an OS drive such as wear leveling. From my experience, without this function the CF card can be dead very easily.
I have very bad memory.. T.T
I’m looking forward to your test results Chippy. There has been a lot of talk recently about whether SSDs are worth it with people noting minimal speed improvements on the Dell and Macbook Air SSDs.
The problem with SSDs is its poor write performance which may offset any gains from the SSDs’ read performance advantage. Have a look at this article:
http://www.storagesearch.com/easyco-flashperformance-art.pdf
nomonia. Some of these CF cards have wear-leveling as I mentioned in the article.
Will. Thanks for the very interesting link although max write speeds for 4200 1.8″ drives are much less than the figures shown in that doc. 50MBps is about the fastest i’ve seen with averages going down to 25-30MBps.
Steve.
Just got my 8gig 300x transend last night. Seriously, if you want one of these cards, go with mydigitaldiscount, 3 days and the cheapest I found. I installed XP pro (nlited with SP3), took under 10 minutes. I installed using an express/54 slot adapter as my IDE and SATA adapters should be arriving early next week. Not sure how to get the system to boot from this, after the install and reboot it’s not being recognized on it’s own after the bios is passed. If anyone has any ideas, let me know (my card is fat32 and set as the boot drive, I disconnected my IDE drive so it won’t try to load it). Gonna do some research today, I’ll post some performace results once I get the adapter if I can’t figure this out.
Great stuff.
Lets make sure we try and keep the testing info in the forum as it will be more helpful.
Forum thread is here.
Steve