This sounds really exciting, maybe for chrismas I can buy myself the parts I need.

I've been looking around for CF->IDE44 adapters, and I found this:

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

An adapter with DUAL cf slots on one IDE channel!

Has anyone tried one of those?

It would be perfect to have two 16Gb CFs, one for windows and one for Ubuntu. The question is if it will fit in the X40? It might be too thick... And will the bios accept another HDD?

X41 certainly will not accept 2 internal HDDs. X40 might. You can only try.

2 CF I cards and a circuit board are not thicker than the original HDD. I am afraid the card on the rear and the keyboard bezel will collide when the connector is in place, though. Might have to bend pins or build your own adapter cable (44 pin male to 44 pin female).

I'm kind of worried about space too, but there's a few things I'm considering:

1) CF-PCMCIA adapter, then I can get another 8-16gb in my pcmcia slot, which I don't use for anything else, though it might make my battery life worse

2) Big SD card. Not sure how many gigs the x41 will recognize

3) Big USB Flash Drive Not as appealing, but probably the easiest, since I have drive lying around that would be fine for holding data

Card on the rear? You mean if I use two cards, it will be too thick in the rear to fit? How did other people make it fit then? Did they use a single CF -> IDE adapter? X41's and X40's are the same size when talking about physical space for the hdd.

Yes. With X41 there is no choice. Stupid SATA IDE bridge.

The only way to find out about 2 CF cards in X40 is to try. Looking at the picture there is a chance it fits mechanically. It might not, though.

Whether or not BIOS recognizes slave I cannot tell.

A dual adaptor is probably cheap. If I had an X40 I would try.

I think I will try. I have two small CF cards lying around at home, I can test if they will be recognized.

If this works, I think I will use software raid in linux and stripe both of them in linux and run windows in vmware

freddy418:


Imagine a two drive stripe of those! Generously about twice the performance, 60MB/s!

Twice the number of write cycles. Half lifetime.

If performance is at all a consideration, 1) and 2) aren't going to make you happy. PCMCIA-CF cards currently top out around 5MB/s and the SD-card reader isn't any better, plus it's limited to 4GB since it can't take SDHC cards. I haven't seen too many fast USB flash drives, but they at least theoretically could get up to 20MB/s.

anyone have any idea if the sandisk extreme cards will work for this?
Edit: nevermind, it looks like it will.

Anybody tried this compact flash yet? The seller gives you a free IDE to compact flash adapter and even claims that the card supports true ide mode:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0169032368

Admin edit: Shortened URL to prevent horizontal scrolling

It's the wrong kind of CF-IDE adapter for an x41t. It might work in a desktop though.

The performance results are pretty bad too.

I'm giving this a whirl with a random CF card I have lying around. What direction does the adapter need to be facing? I can't tell if I'm inserting it upside-down or not. Should the flatter side of the adapter be facing down or up once inside the slot (assuming I'm looking at my laptop as it would normally sit on a desk)?

Trumpetdc: For my adapter, the label side of the compact flash card was facing down. Check out the notch in your harddrive (the standard hard drive is upside down as well) and make sure the notch on that (where there is no pin) matches on your adapter. (I believe the pinless side is up)

Also, I got my RiData 16GB compactflash card and have some performance results (using linux and formatted as ReiserFS).

I ran the performance test 3 times (it reads roughly 100MB worth of data each time) and got the following results:
37.16MB/s, 32.52MB/s, and 33.81MB/s.

So not bad, almost up to the speed of the average desktop hard drive. This also corresponds with the manufactuers official specs of a read speed of 35MB/s. Not sure of anyway to test writes unfortunately.
Also something that may be of interest was the timed cached read from memory, 2840MB read in 2 seconds at 1419.96MB/s. I believe the memory bus on the x41t is rated for 1.6GB/s, so that's fairly close.

Everyone should note though that just because it's flash doesn't mean that any random old compactflash card, even if it supports trueIDE will be faster. That one linked to at the ebay website was outputting results slower than the x41t harddrive. It only lists reads as 15585 KB/s, which seems like it doesn't even support UDMA4 then, just the PIO modes. (so the flash might be faster, but the protocol it supports isn't)

Thanks Fox. I've tried it both ways now and gotten nothing. Must be the card.

Has anyone been using a CF card for a main drive for more than a few months?

I'm really tempted to try this out but am worried about the write cycle limitations and don't fully understand the worst case scenarios.

Honestly, even anecdotal evidence wouldn't help much since everyone uses their drives differently. With built in wear-leveling and the swap file turned off, the drives should last for a while, but no idea how effective the built in wear-leveling is.
On top of that, many accounts online recommend against using NTFS or any other journaled file system and just to use FAT32 since it has less writes (at the expense of reliability and performance), but I have no idea how much less.

If you're willing to Linux, it's possible to use a file system built for flash with built in wear leveling (you could also download an add on for windows to use other file systems and just boot off fat32/ntfs and have another partition for everything else). What's strange is that these all use journaling, which would make it seem that journaling isn't that bad for flash drives after all.

If you want to be safe, look up the write cycle limitations of the drive (or make them readonly, which is possible to do in both linux and windows) and see which ones are over a million. Many 8GB cards are, as the SSD drives probably are in the several millions.
A 16GB drive with 100,000 write cycle endurance theoretically would last about a year if you completely rewrote every bit on the drive 3 times a day. Everything else is just linear scaling, so 10x the survival time for 1,000,000 write cycles, but only 5x if it's an 8GB drive.
Of course, depending on the wear leveling built into the drive, so sectors will get rewritten much more than others. I'd imagine the drive will be capable of marking those sectors as bad though and using others instead, in which case you'd want a journaling file system such as NTFS, ext3, or Reiser since they can recover from the errors and restore the data. (of these, I believe ext3 is the best at this, NTFS the worst, and Reiser the most efficient with small files and space usage, not sure if NTFS offers any advantages, other than being the best file system natively supported by windows)

I've been running XP on a CF in my X24 for a couple of months and haven't had any problems.

Btw, I just noticed that my results for cached reads are about twice what DVormann got in his tests. I wonder why that could be, perhaps dual channel memory, a newer bios, or just a more efficient file system?

My X41 does not offer dual channel. BIOS 2.09 and controller 1.02 are the latest. Filesystem for that test was FAT32. Which hardware , BIOS and file system are you using? I'd like to sort this out. Might improve performance.

Can the filesystem affect cached reads at all? I am under the impression "cached reads" copies to ram first then reads from there.

Fox5: Thank you for your detailed and helpful reply.

I'm looking at this Transcend 16gb CF card, which according to the datasheet has wear-levelling built in. Hopefully the worst case scenario will be that it will only last around a year, with file capacity slowly decreasing as wear-levelling disables parts of the device.

Faberryman: Have you done anything special, like disabling virtual memory? Also, how often do you use your laptop?

Ultimately, I'm worried that I'll spend about £100 on a 16gb compact flash and it will only last about a month or two.

I have disable virtual memory. I use mine as an iTunes server, believe it or not, until I can finish up my HTPC, and do some internet surfing as well. It's on 24/7, but gets what I would consider light use.

Actually...that would be SAME the number of write cycles....Same lifetime.

EDIT: ...And Twice the performance

You have an X41 or an X41t? AFAIK, the chipset supports dual channel, though I don't know if its usable, it shouldn't matter anyhow though since I think the memory bus of the cpu actually supports 3.2GB/s per channel, not 1.6GB/s.
I was using an x41t with 1.5GB of ram, a RiData compactflash 16GB drive, the latest bios and controller, but I don't know if the filesystem affects cached reads at all.
I was using the ReiserFS file system.
Perhaps it's just a difference between the x41t and the x41.
I also had no swap partition. It's possible that maybe my drive has built in cache? I think DMA was enabled, but I'm not sure. Or maybe not having a swap partition causes it to use only main ram for the cache test.

TotallyT:
http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/cs_TS16GCF133.html

Apparently that 16GB compactflash card doesn't have bad read speeds. I went with the RiData since it was listed as a 233x speed, but that was probably only referring to read speed, whereas the transcend rating appears to refer to write speeds. Can't find anything about endurance though.

Interesting, the 16GB Ridata card is no longer available off of newegg, and the transcend and a-data are sold out. Guess they didn't have very big stock.

I just got the Super Talent drive. I have the x41 tablet and I have been trying to use the recovery cds to recover to the new drive but after it copies the first disc it reboots and wont boot from the ssd drive.
Is there some setting in the bios that I am missing that has these CF drives working for you guys?

Performed a clean install. There is little point in using 3.5+ GB for the recovery partition with an 8 GB card.
For HPA (hidden protected area) to work the drive needs to support certain ATA commands. Not every flash/SSD drive does.

i got the 32 gb super talent drive. A clean install wont work for me because its a tablet and a normal windows install doesnt work for tablet function

On large files you are right. A 2 byte file requires one block to be written without raid. Using raid 0 two blocks get written.

Later versions of Windows XP came with the tablet files on them. Just enter your tablet cd key and it should install the tablet pc os.

You can actually use this article
to create an install copy of XP Tablet using the files present in your hd.
Actually I don't have an X41... but if what it's stated in this article is true, maybe the speed with the original hd would not be so bad after a clean install.

Incidentally this would also mean saving money