okay, so I'm running into some problems. Got an x41t with a 8gb transcend card. I can't get the adapter to fit into the hdd slot. I have an adapter that looks like this http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/9044/img6840uo2.jpg

It's got all the same pins, and I'm pretty sure i'm lining it up correctly, but it's like the top of the cavity where the hdd normally sits isn't tall enough. i tried forcing it sorta (bad idea), and had a few moments where i could even turn it on.

Anyone else have any trouble connecting the adapter to the connectors inside where the hdd previously was?

ugh.

so i whittled at the some of the soldering to get it to fit. but now having trouble installing windows on the thing. i've gotten about two blue screens of death and the farthest i could get was it saying that it couldn't format my hdd (cf card).

thoughts?

Can anyone verify this?

I have xp sp2, and tablet definitely did not come on it.

My adapter looks the same. Circuit board goes up, CF card down. Connecting to the right pins took some time and a small torch. Difficult to see anything in that cavity.

Trumpetdc, I have the same adapter and it took a few tries but I eventually got it in without doing anything special. Make sure the compact flash card is upside down (or just match the missing pin orientation with the missing pin orientation on the hard drive) and use a flash light so you can guide it better. Some tweezer grips might help too.



Did you try installing it using the tablet cd key? I haven't, but I've heard this works.

yeah i've given up for now.

I'm pretty sure that tablet functionality in xp is not based on the cd key. I had to create a tablet install cd from an xp pro cd and the install files that lenovo puts on the computer. And i've also heard of people that have reinstalled xp with their tablet cd key, which led to no tablet functionality.

I dunno, I heard the opposite at one point.

You could also request install cds from lenovo, they may or may not charge you. (should be like $50 if they do) That, or see if you can borrow some cds from someone or something similar.

I actually created a fresh install CD of WinXP tablet about 1 year and half before. As I remember, the CD key is not the one on the bottom of the machine. It's inside the Windows folder.

I've tested some CF cards and hard drives with HD Tach and here are the results:

Toshiba 1GB CF
burst speed: 7.9 MB/s
random access: 2.1 ms
average read: 7.2 MB/s

SanDisk Extreme II 2GB
burst speed: 11.7 MB/s
random access: 1.3 ms
average read: 10.8 MB/s

SanDisk Extreme III 2GB
burst speed: 18.4 MB/s
random access: 1.4 ms
average read: 15.9 MB/s

Toshiba 1.8" 20GB 4200 RPM HDD
burst speed: 19.6 MB/s
random access: 21.2 ms
average read: 13.2 MB/s

Hitachi 2.5" 30GB 4200 RPM HDD
burst speed: 32.1 MB/s
random access: 17.8 ms
average read: 21.4 MB/s

Western Digital 3.5" 500GB 7200 RPM HDD
burst speed: 192.3 MB/s
random access: 13.5 ms
average read: 70.6 MB/s

I'm running XP Pro on a CF in an X24. I "upgraded" from a 2GB SanDisk Extreme II to an 2GB SanDisk Extreme III (on sale for $35) and it responds noticeably better - quite acceptable. Notice how close its specs are to the 4200 RPM 1.8" drive, except for random access time where it smokes the HDD. I think a SanDisk Extreme IV or equivalent would easily perfom better than the 1.8" HDD but they are a little pricey. I'm happy with the SanDisk Extreme III.

Note: The IDE interface for the SanDisk Extreme II is UDMA2 while with the SanDisk Extreme III it is Multi-Word UDMA2. I'll have to do some research to find out what that means.

Haven't had a chance to run any battery tests yet.

'
Can you please do some real world tests on the Sandisk Extreme III? Just copy a 100MB file (a movie or something) from a faster medium and time it.

I've heard rumours that similar filepatterns are faster then the more mixed ones of real files.

So what is the situation of the Super Talent SSD? Are you able to boot from these SSDs after clean install?

I'm sad to announce that a dual CF adapter does not work on the X40.

I tried with one Sandisk Extreme III 1gb and a GeeDom CF 128mb.

I get an error and it won't boot.

The good news is that atleast one CF works with this adapter.

So now I'm gonna buy a 16gb Extreme III or Lexar Equivalent and run ubuntu on it.

Which error code?

I think it was "0200", I can check again tonight.

Yo, I've got a CompactFlash slot on my X24. Can I boot off of it? That would be pretty sweet--choose a hard drive and OS based on what you need at the time. Best Buy is even having a sale on Sandisk Extreme III 4gb cards.

According to the boot devices menu, I can boot off of "removable devices," but I suspect this refers to removable media and USB drives.


Some more googling turned up this page:
http://zurich.ai.mit.edu/hypermail/thin ... /0580.html

So the CF slot is treated as PCMCIA, and PCMCIA is apparently unbootable..true? It seems odd that you wouldn't be able to boot from the card slot.

I wouldn't want to start playing with a soldering iron on my motherboard, so I don't think I'd try and make a direct link between the CF slot and the IDE connectors. That's ridiculous...but you can tell that in my head, I'm investigating the possibilities. Of course, it makes much more sense to just buy the IDE->CF adapter.

Got a Delkin cardbus 32 UDMA adaptor. Tested the following 3 Transcend CF cards in my X41:

- TS8GCF266 in IDE adaptor (boot disk; Win XP)
- TS4GCF266 in cardbus
- TS16GCF133 in cardbus


- TS8GCF266 in IDE adaptor
HDtach: 38.1 MB/s read; 0.5 ms
copy large files to/from LAN: 25MB/s read with 25-60 % CPU load; 12 MB/s write with 7 % CPU load

- TS4GCF266 in cardbus
HDtach: 43.7 MB/s read; 0.7 ms
copy large files to/from LAN: 25MB/s read with 25-60 % CPU load; 1.1 MB/s write with < 2 % CPU load

- TS16GCF133 in cardbus
HDtach: 33.3 MB/s read; 3.8 ms
copy large files to/from LAN: 23MB/s read with 25-60 % CPU load; 350-400 kB/s write with < 2 % CPU load

The Delkin adaptor gets noticeably warm under the right palm. XP recognizes it as a SCSI controller. The driver is available for download from Delkin.

Don't know why write rates are low. Is X41 cardbus that slow? Or is it the adaptor?


The device is useful for carrying extra data in cardbus. 8 or 16 GB CF instead of HDD plus another 8-16 GB in cardbus. Read speeds are pretty quick.

possible uses:
- Install extra applications on the card in this adaptor. 'Program files' gets hardly ever written to.
- Offline version of wikipedia.de is about 7 GB. Guess I'll place that in cardbus.
- Install the entire OS in cardbus. Must boot from IDE, though. Like bootloader and data on HDD, OS on CF in cardbus. How to load the driver?

Holy *****Expletives removed by Moderator***** it works!

I got a Sandisk Extreme IV and decided to try with a different CF card on my dual CF adapter just in case the GeeDom card was bad.

And it works! Two CF-cards show up as two separate harddrives!

I've ordered another 8gb Extreme IV card and I'm gonna go RAID 0.
Guess I'm gonna have the first X40 in the world with two striped harddrives huh?

The adapter I'm using is the Lycom ST-317P4M.

http://www.lycom.com.tw/ST317p4m.htm

Hi all ! I need help from my fellow Europeans.

I want to buy an cf adapter for my X40. I need one that works 100% and it can be bought on Amazon or E-Bay or any other site that accepts VISA credit card and that ships outside EU (to Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina).
Thank you !

I have just successfully upgraded my ThinkPad X40 to a 32GB (2x16GB) SSD using an Addonics AD44MIDE2CF dual-CF to IDE adapter ($30 + s&t on a PCMall corporate acct.), and 2 Transcend 133X CF cards ($119/ea. + s&t from newegg.com). Both the adapter and cards support UDMA modes, and with my X40 upgraded to the most recent BIOS, the two cards show up as two separate drives. The adapter plus cards fit perfectly in the hard drive bay, and didn't even require the carrier attached to the normal hard drive (thus I was able to leave it attached which will make switching drives that much quicker should I need to). I'm planning on using the master (C: ) drive for the OS and programs (figuring it would fail first over time), and the slave (currently D: ) drive for my My Documents folder (in WinXP I'll attach it to "look" like the My Documents folder). I'm also thinking of getting the Delkin CF-PCMCIA CardBus adapter someone mentioned here and putting a third 16GB card in for more storage (perhaps MP3 folder or something), and then adding a 4GB *non*-SDHC card (yes, I have found some 4GB SD cards that seem to be of the regular SD variety), which would bring my grand total disk space to 52GB. True, I could just buy the Hitachi 60GB drive and call it a day, but being highly mobile, the idea of a virtually shock-resistant computer is enticing.

Here's the problem though ... currently I'm running my XP install and this thing is *SLOW*! I realize I'm probably going to want to turn on NTFS drive compression, shut off the swap file, eliminate unnecessary drivers/services/etc. And of course due to lifetime write cycles on the CF cards I'll probably want to start using suspend instead of hibernate. But right now it feels like this thing isn't even running in UDMA mode at all, it's that slow. I feel like I'm installing Windows 95 off of floppies (except for not having to switch disks)!

So, my question is this ... for those of you who have tried the more "premium" brand CF cards, I'm wondering if your experience has been the same ("horribly slow"). I know it could also be the Addonics adapter I'm using, but I did after all buy "cheap" CF cards (there was one cheaper card but it was a 40X, so I paid a few extra $ for the 133X). I can currently get SanDisk Extreme III 16GB for about $260 + s&t, but since this was a "first try" and I wasn't even sure the adapter plus cards would fit in the computer and/or work, I didn't want to spend too much. If anyone has had a much more positive experience with a different card/adapter combination I'd be interested to know. After all, I can always use one of the cards for another data drive (i.e. in the Delkin adapter), and one to upgrade an old 4GB iPod Mini I have sitting around into basically a shock-proof 16GB Nano (yes, I've read confirmed reports the model of card I bought works for that purpose).

Perhaps once Windows is installed and doing "normal" use I'll have a more positive outlook ... after all, software installation is mostly sequential writing, where day-to-day use seems to me would be more random reading.

Incidentally, I found another strange problem doing the XP install--with a preformatted NTFS and compressed drive, the 1st stage of Windows setup completed but then I got a "Disk Read Error" when it reboots to go to the second phase. Installing to an uncompressed NTFS drive did not yield this error. Also, this configuration doesn't seem to support a hard drive password, I guess since it's not "really" a hard drive with the accompanying firmware one would have.

Anyone try Ubuntu using a setup like this? I've just started dabbling with that, first using Microsoft VPC and Parallels Workstation, and now have it running nicely on a spare HP Pavilion notebook (well, except for the fact I seem to have destroyed the wireless drivers ... oops) ...

Thanks!

For now, I need to be getting ready to head to the office (says "19 minutes" remaining, but I've been installing for an hour and a half already!), but at least I can keep the computer on and installing Windows in my messenger bag now and not worry about destroying the hard drive riding the subway (plus the battery life I'd imagine should be even better now, too).

Does the X40/X41 card reader support a 4 GB SD-card? I'd really like to know. There are several 4 GB SD cards. Not all readers can handle them. SD specification limits them to 2 GB.

You might consider FAT32 rather than NTFS for speed and less write cycles.


Of course.


The IBM-setup includes tons of unnecessary stuff.


Boot Linux (any live-CD or DVD will do) and run: That will tell about UDMA.


TS16GCF133 is capable of UDMA4. According to the manufacturer, the adaptor supports UDMA as well.

I did a clean install on my CF card. Created a boot-CD from the i386 directory. It ran pretty well.

Okay, here's the update.

WinXP install took *THREE* hours to finish. Bootup is respectably fast (maybe even faster than my previous Hitachi 40GB HDD), but for some reason once in Windows everything slows to a crawl. I timed copying about 50MB of files off a USB flash drive and it took 2 minutes, which worked out to 426.67K/sec., or just under 3X speed. The progress bar sped across while reading from the flash drive, and then went from "5 seconds remaining" to "2 minutes remaining" and slowed to a crawl once writing began.

Windows does report that the card is using "Ultra DMA Mode 4" (actually my OS and data drives are both reporting that), but obviously that cannot be the case, or else something else is seriously slowing things down. Any ideas? My thought is it's gotta' be some kind of setting somewhere ...

I'm trying to install the Intel chipset drivers, thinking maybe that will help recognize the HDD controller properly, but the installer keeps crashing. Hopefully I'll get that part working; maybe it's the fix.

Incidentally I have a 512MB SD card in the reader right now, and that operates at a nice speedy pace. So it seems it's just my "IDE" CF cards that are bogging down in speed.



I didn't do a restore; I did a clean install from an actual Microsoft OEM CD.

I'm tempted to take the second card and try a FAT32 file system install to see if it makes a difference in speed.



Not sure on this, but if I get one I'll post the result here.

I feel like I'm "so close" on this one, but right now the performance is pretty unusable. Yet, being so close, I don't want to give up just yet!

ADDENDUM: after backreading DVormann's post of 11/4 with the read/write speed tests, I noticed results similar to mine on the extremely slow write speeds for the 133X card:



This is roughly in line with my 426.67K/sec. figure. And we were using different interfaces, CardBus on DVormann's setup, and UDMA/IDE for mine. This leads me to be almost sure it's the card (as I suspected for the "cheap" route, you get what you pay for).

I'm going to pick up a SanDisk Extreme IV (40MB/sec.; $189.95 + tax @ B&H Photo (bhphotovideo.com for those of you who can't just go to their store--joys of living in NYC!)) card when I leave the office, and try it out later on. Unfortunately it'll be an 8GB, but if it does the trick I'll deal with the reduced OS drive space for now (next year they'll surely have bigger ones available), and perhaps reallocate the spare Transcend card as another data drive, or upgrade that iPod Mini ... who knows.

BTW, I was trying a FAT32 installation just now, and it isn't making much of a difference. Hence, again, "it must be the card".

The saga continues ...

Got my SanDisk Extreme IV 8GB card from B&H. Tried to install XP, both using NTFS and FAT32. Both NTFS and FAT32 gave their versions of "unable to boot" after completing the first phase of XP setup (which, I might add, was noticeably faster on the file copying ... the HDD light was periodically blinking, instead of constantly being on like before, indicating much faster operation now).

I finally figured out by reading SanDisk's site and the packaging, that the Extreme IV, while it is a 40MB/sec. r/w card, *does not* seem to support UDMA!! I'd gone with it instead of a Lexar 300X UDMA card because I found a forum post saying the SanDisk was somewhat faster in write ops. That does no good if it won't work as a hard drive ... Windows sees the SanDisk as a "removable disk" and is therefore unable to write an MBR to the disk, and also can't work with the partition table either (since removable disks I guess don't have them?).

Moral of this chapter ... at least in my own experience, the SanDisk Extreme IV (and seemingly Extreme III as well, per their website and a dpreview.com review) *will not* work in the Addonics adapter (and likely other adapters as well) as a bootable hard drive.

Argh!

Tomorrow morning I guess I'll swing back by B&H and exchange this card for the slightly cheaper (though the SanDisk had a rebate available) Lexar 300X UDMA and go from there.

We're getting closer to a solution here ...

This is a VERY interesting read - definitely post what you find out

- and when you do succeed - make sure you post a step-by-step walk through.

~above~

XP recognizes the Delkin adaptor as a SCSI controller. I suppose the card does not run in cardbus/pcmcia mode. IDE mode is more likely.


I just placed those two CF-cards in a desktop as IDE devices. TS4GCF266 writes large files at 9+ MB/s (copied via 100 Mbit ethernet). Write speeds on TS16GCF133 vary between 3.5 MB/s and 350 kB/s.

I think we can safely say TS16GCF133 is not suitable for use in IDE mode. I still wonder: That card is intended for professional photography. Uncompressed pictures are easily 10 MB in size. In which mode do high end cameras run CF cards? They certainly do not write only 400 kB/s.

In addition, I tried both cards in a Delock 91404 cardbus CF adaptor. That way they write even slower than with the Delkin adaptor.

Transcend TSxGCF266 cards are fine attached directly to IDE. Might try a Delkin CF-card in the Delkin adaptor next. Those 305x cards are not cheap.

The Sandisk Extreme IV does support UDMA. And it will work as a harddrive as I'm using it as one now (Running ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon). I have not tried installing windows, don't really have the need for it anymore....

And if Windows recognizes your card as a removable disk, then there must be an issue with your CF->IDE adapter. Tonight I'll try and boot up a windows xp install, and see if the hdd shows up.

Hey All. Long time reader, first time poster. After reading this thread and 3 months of my own testing, I've decide to share my findings.

HISTORY

Early summer 2007, I read about the Asus Eee subnotebook and realized that I missed my old X20. I decided to buy an X40 off of eBay and planned to eventually get a solid state drive. I bought the X40 and maxed out the memory. It was great for the first two weeks, but the clicking of the drive started getting on my nerves. A 16gb SDD for the X40 cost $1000, so I decided to use a ide-to-compactflash adapter and a fast compactflash card instead.


HARDWARE

I have used both the single and dual slot CF Hard Drive Adapters from Addonics. They both fit perfectly into the X40 and support UDMA for the fastest CFs available. The speed of the compactflash card you use makes all the difference along with your choice of OS. You get what you pay for and will be very happy with the Lexar 300x UDMA or Sandisk Extreme IV cards which both support udma mode. The Sandisk Extreme III cards are a slightly slower and are great for file storage and applications that don't rely heavily on write speeds, Stay away from the Transcend cards. I tried two Transcend 16gb 133x cards and it was a Overused word. The speeds were not as advertised. The card seems to hit some kind of buffer limit when writing large files and constantly slows down and hangs both WinXP and Linux.

One other thing to keep in mind is that compactflash cards have an internal ID that identifies them as either a fixed disk or a removable media. This is important when it comes to XP but doesn't make a differences with Linux. The ID of some older cards like the Sandisk Ultra II cards can be change using a utility from the manufacturer. Most cards today identify as removable media and their ID cannot be changed.

Thanks to wearleveling, a CF with 1,000,000 write cycles would theoretically take 51 years of continuously writing to every block before the entire CF would reach its write limit. Swap files and heavy IO applications are still out of the question.


LINUX

Any compactflash card will work with linux. I've even used a standard 4gb sandisk CF along with a Lexar 8gb UDMA CF for the home partition and it was GREAT. I was even able to run XP in a virtual machine for work using vmware server flawlessly. I do recommend mounting /tmp and /var/tmp as tmpfs so that all temporary files are written to memory and not the CF. The same should be done for /var/log, but requires some script modification to write the files to CF on shutdown. You'll also want to use the atime flag on all your mounts to disable the writing of access time everytime a file is read or written. Google is your friend on all matters tmpfs and atime. Once again, the use of a swap partition or swap file is NOT recommended.


WinXP SP2

If you're using a CF that identifies as a fixed disk, you'll have no problems with a straight install. The slower the CF, the looooooonger the install time.

If you're using a CF that identifies as removable media, you have some extra work to do to overcome the limitations imposed by XP. And just in case you're wondering, imaging a CF identified as removable media from a hard drive install will not boot even after using fixmbr and fixboot in the recovery console.

Assuming your card has a single FAT32 partition, here's what you need to do:

1) Install the CF card. Use only one card if you're using the dual slot adapter or the XP install program will fail.

2) Boot from a Win98 or DOS and run bootprep.exe. (Google is your friend)

3) Format the CF as FAT32.

4) Run the XP install CD.

5) Once the install is complete and XP is up and running, install the Hitachi microdrive disk drivers for your CF so that it treated as a fixed disk. (Google is your friend)

6) Use the "convert c: /fs:ntfs" command to convert the drive from FAT32 to NTSF.



Make sure that you use the WinXP Powertoys to disable background defragging. You should also use the "FSUTIL behaviour set disablelastaccess 1" command to disable the writing of access time every time a file is read or written. Disable system restore, swap file, and the index service.


SUMMARY

There have been so many reports of success and failures with using the X40 with an ide-to-CF adapter that the real story is probably confusing to most people. If you're not lucky enough to find a fast enough CF that's recognized as a fixed disk, the information above should get you up and running with XP. The Lexar 300x UDMA and Sandisk Extreme IV are recognized by XP as removable media, so you'll have to use the steps above to get XP up and working with the two fastest cards available right now. Linux should install with no problems.

Enjoy!!!

-Slade

Great info Tekkaman_Slade!

But I think you're wrong about the Sandisk Extreme IV.
I started up the winxp install just to see if the card would show up as a harddrive... And it did. And it didn't show anything abnormal.

But since I've just installed linux I didn't start the install to see if it'll work.

You mean that if I've gone further, the install would have failed?

The first part of the WinXp install process where all the major files are copied over to the drive will complete, but when the machine reboots to continue the installation by booting from the drive, the machine hangs because it can't boot from the Extreme IV since it is identified as removable media. I tried this over 4 times and received the same painful result. This is why bootprep needs to be run first on the removable media before starting the XP install. This is an XP imposed limit and is not an issue in Linux. It's mostly likely because XP refuses to install the master boot record to removable media during the initial part of the install. The standard Sandisk and Ultra II CF cards work perfectly from scratch once you have changed their ID to fixed disk, but the ID for the Extreme III and IV cards cannot be changed.

The quickest way to find out if a CF is identified as removable media or a fixed disk is to place the CF in a 2.5'' usb drive enclosure using the ide-to-CF adapter and plug the enclusure into the usb port of a WinXP machine. It will show up as either removable media or a hard drive under the windows explorer (My Computer on the the start menu).

I've also found out the hard way that just because a CF is advertised as supporting "True IDE Mode" doesn't mean that it identifies as a fixed disk.

-Slade

Okay, here's the latest.

I "traded" the SanDisk Extreme IV card for the Lexar 300X 8GB card. When I popped it in the machine, same thing. Still no go. Much thanks to Tekkaman_Slade's posts, I think I'm more clear now on why I haven't been having luck. Figuring the Transcend 266X cards seemed to test okay speed-wise, and the so-called "133X" worked as a fixed disk (if an extremely slow one) so that company's products were a reasonable bet, I ordered a Transcend 266X 8GB card that will be waiting for me when I get back from being away for the weekend. I don't really feel like messing with BootPrep and all that DOS stuff (I'd just like to pop in a card and have it work just like a regular hard drive).



Fair enough. I guess for XP it's the whole deal about the cards being treated as removable, rather than the presence or absence of UDMA support being an issue. I'd be happy to tinker with Linux but if the machine is intended to become my main on-the-go high mobility system I need it to be running Windows/Office/etc. Maybe I'll use the Lexar 300X for Linux if I get Windows worked out (and seeing how easy removing one screw and changing a CF card is, I can easily switch between OSs on the go).

Right now I'm running the computer on the 4GB MicroDrive I pulled out of that iPod (yes, I now have a 16GB flash-based iPod Mini!), and it's quieter and seemingly faster than the stock Hitachi 40GB drive that came with the computer (and from what I understand about MicroDrives, more shock tolerant as well) ...

I'll post the results of my next attempt at it (with the 266X Transcend card), as well as if/when I pick up a 4GB SD card ...