Lexar 200X CF slow - not 25MB/s slow but 2.8MB/s max slow!!!

[ganon11000]

I bought a CF/IDE adapter and a Lexar 200X 8GB CF card off of ebay and upon installing windows its ******* slow!!
when I used the card in linux it was quite usable ... but I don't like linux and there is no GPU driver!
put it in my desktop (same adapter) and it got 40+ MB/s read and 8MB/s Write (sequential) but using it with windows XP SP3 on my x41-2525-F8G it gets:
2.802MB/s read and 1.474MB/s write (sequential)
0.932MB/s read and 0.718MB/s write (512K)
0.016MB/s read and 0.005MB/s write (4K)
0.861MB/s read and 0.035MB/s write (4K QD32)

Hitachi Microdrive Driver is in use to make it think it's a fixed disk

Any way to make it faster???

BTW XP seems to be using the disk non-stop (nothing but xp installed) which may impact on results? & I've ordered a kingston ultimate 266X 16GB to see if it's the card but lexar are a good brand?

to confirm:

on my windows 7 PC, same adapter I get:
49.52MB/s read and 6.101MB/s write (sequential)
49.64MB/s read and 1.444MB/s write (512K)
10.18MB/s read and 0.019MB/s write (4K)
15.67MB/s read and 0.027MB/s write (4K QD 32)

loads better than in xp!!!

and here is my usb HDD (which runs the sims 3 - all expansions with little jitter:

Sequential Read : 39.231 MB/s
Sequential Write : 32.383 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 26.149 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 30.605 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.538 MB/s [ 131.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.566 MB/s [ 382.4 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.559 MB/s [ 136.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.614 MB/s [ 394.2 IOPS]

Test : 50 MB [X: 59.6% (177.6/298.1 GB)] (x3)
Date : 2013/03/16 14:45:49
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

is it a driver issue? or is xp just ****?

[dr_st]

The controller probably defaulted to PIO mode for whatever reason. You should be able to change it to UDMA. Google "XP change PIO to UDMA" or something like that.

With that said, even your high reported speeds are dreadful compared to what one can expect from a standard IDE drive.

[ganon11000]

It's better than my USB 3.0 HDD (results posted) and since I only want to browse the web I have no need to have high write speed!

BTW it's a X41 and the original HDD got no better than 20MB/s?

It's already in UDMA 4!

As I previously said the card is fine and so is the adapter as well as the X41 (runs great on linux but high cpu usage is a pain - no GPU acceleration)

WHAT IS WRONG WITH XP!!!!!!!

[dr_st]

Yeah, my bad, I only today noticed how all the Lexar allegedly super-fast UDMA CF cards are total crap when it comes to write speed. It's mind-boggling that some of their cards can give 100MB/s read and 10MB/s write. I would stay away from Lexar cards just for that. Sandisk tends to make good memory cards that actually give good read and write.

What's wrong with XP, you ask? It's an old OS, and sometimes may be glitchy.

Just for the heck of it - see what speeds you get in XP when you run in safe mode.

[twistero]

CF cards, especially consumer cards that focus on photography, are usually heavily optimized for large sequential read/writes. They have terrible random read/write performance as a result. Windows XP does small random read/writes all the time, even if you're "only browsing the web" (or letting it idle, for that matter). Therefore, using XP on a CF card will severely bog down the system.

If you want good performance, either get a proper SSD, a CF card that has good random read/write performance (I'm not sure such a card even exists. Maybe one of those "industrial" cards?), or switch to a lightweight Linux distribution. For those looking for adventure, try integrating EWF into XP.

[ganon11000]

I know, but pear Linux runs nice and fast when my Kingston ultimate comes I'll try windows 7 on it and will try to hack WDDM on to it (using the GMA950 driver)

It is a crap card but works for Linux ... When I need to only browse the web