X20-series why is CF slot *really* slow?

[vincentfox]

I haven't done any serious benchmarks, but it seems like the CF slot on my X23 is much slower than I would have thought. I mean I picked up a nice 4-gig CF card so I could some quick backups of the My Documents folder, but they aren't very quick. Any idea why this might be? Could I have a driver issue, or is this just a hardware limit like maybe it's chained off the USB 1.1 internally?

[pxa270]

The built-in CF slot is actually a shrunken PC-Card slot. Internally, it hangs off the Cardbus controller, so it can theoretically attain blazing speeds. Unfortunately, CF cards will only operate in a very slow backwards compatible PCMCIA memory mode when connected directly to PCMCIA/Cardbus. The same holds when you use a CF card in the full-size PC-Card slot through a dumb PCMCIA-CF adapter (the sub $10 adapters, which have no electronics inside but only connect the pins to different form factors). AFAIK, with the built-in CF slot there's nothing you can do about it.

You could get better speeds by using Cardbus USB2 / Firewire and the appropriate CF adapters. Or by using a real 32-bit Cardbus CF adapter, such as these, from Lexar and Delkin. But they're a bit pricey for such an old system.

In the end, it's a bit of a waste to use the built-in CF slots of the X20 and X30 series for the fast modern CF cards, except for occasional small file transfers. But the slot does work great with other CF peripherals such as WLAN, Bluetooth or GPS cards.

[thibouille27]

The CF slot is useful as a little backup place to drop a couple important files. We never know what might happen to a disk drive.
That's what I do with my wife's computer: a little 512MB slow CF card stays there at all time.

[johnson]

I plan on getting a 2GB card for the CF slot to keep important files and the Delkin adapter with 8gb card when prices go down.

Are there any ways to password protect the CF card in case the laptop gets lost or stolen?

edit - I just found this auction and bought a Kingston 2GB card. Newegg has it for $10 more. Seller has another one at the time of this post.

Kingston ElitePro 2GB Compact Flash CF Card 50X NEW USA

[thibouille27]

Not asfar asI know but you can protect your files, encrypt Zip archives or use CSS Private Disk stored on your CF.