Thinkpads Forum

I have a couple Sandisk SDHC cards rated at 30mb/sec. This seems like an adequate speed and is at least as fast as CF cards. The problem I'm running into is that I can't figure out which SDHC to 2.5" adapter I should buy.

Originally planned on purchasing something like this: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.19737

The one review says that it's slow, and now I'm hesitant to buy it. The ones on Ebay are suspicious as well because they all look like a similar design.

Does anyone have experience with these type of adapters? Any recommendations?

In my experiences with most SDHC cards, 30 mb/s is pretty optimistic. I've used such card in usb readers to boot from and they are painfully slow. I use them to boot DSLinux to test machines sometimes, and they usually run at half the speed of your average no-name usb drive.

My point is, it may not be the adapter that's causing the bottleneck

Really fast device: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.17790
But it's SATA drive replacement.
And the price isn't low

Thanks for the info NorrisCell. I'm hoping that these Sandisk cards really do run at 30mb/sec since they're from a reputable company. I received the adapter and CrystalDiskMark shows a quite slow seq read speed of under 10mb/sec. In real use, it works about the same as another setup with the old 12gb 4200RPM disk. The biggest annoyance (other than the slow speed) is that XP treats it as a removable disk so no Windows Update and MS Office doesn't install. I've manually installed SP3 and Open Office. System Restore Service and Perfdisk have to be disabled or else it stalls on loading Windows. The benefit of the SDHC setup is that 600X runs completely silent. Even with the fan shut off it runs fine.

FYI to anyone else thinking of trying this, "Ctrl Alt Del" during the Windows Welcome screen seems to allow XP to continue loading so you can get to the desktop and disable those services.

@tporter: Thanks for the link! I actually saw a PATA version of that.. as you said, the price isn't low! The next thing to try is a CF to SDHC and a CF to 2.5" adapter together. I also have a SATA and a ZIF that I am thinking of trying to fit in my machines using a SATA/PATA and 2.5" to ZIF adapters. So many projects so little time!