Problem with installing Compact Flash instead of HDD in X40

[xDissident]

Hi all!
I have a problem with Compact Flash card in my X40, tried to install it instead of HDD, but have no success, my ThinkPad don't see Compact Flash card through IDE 44pin-CF adapter. Even in BIOS setup. Any disk management software don't see CF card. Also, Linux Ubuntu livecd don't see too.
IDE 44pin-CF adapter with my card works well with IDE-USB external box. Default HDD works well, so controller is alive.

Type of my adaptor is V.B1, I've seen also V.B0 type. What's the difference?

Maybe I need custom BIOS which support non-Hitachi/IBM drives? Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

[sjthinkpader]

Welcome to the forum.

Since you are installing in a X4x, the adapter should be inserted upside down, card side facing downward, pin 1 to the right. Be sure to insulate any exposed pins by taping it with electrical tape. I usually remove the palmrest so I can make sure correct insertion.

The card should be formatted as NTFS just to circumvent the fixed/removable CIS bit in case it was set in your CF card.

I got reasonable performance from a 233X RiDATA card. Your 200X card may be close enough to work.

[xDissident]

Thanks for your reply! And sorry for my poor English.

The problem was in the "key" pin of IDE interface and also in my inexactness: I inserted card wrong (1 row lower). But when I inserted card right, my ThinkPad turned off during POST and I could turned on it only when I re-inserted battery. When I removed "key" pin of IDE interface (which was empty on HDD), X40 saw compact flash card correctly.

BUT there is a BIG problem
I've installed Windows XP SP3 (which took more time than with HDD) and got very slow perfomance. Card working in UDMA 5 mode, read speed is about 52-54 mbytes per second, BUT write speed is only about 11-13 mbytes per second. Some programs boot faster, but in common ThinkPad runs very very slow now, 2x slower than with standart 4200rpm HDD. I even can't use more than 1 program at the moment, cause if one program are writing information on CF, all other are not responding. I never saw things like this with my HDD.
Also, switching to hibernate mode now takes about 2 minutes even if there is no additional application running.
Card formatted in NTFS. Various cluster size fundamentally don't influence speed.

So now I really don't know what to do. Is such writing speed normal for 200x card? And what does it mean 200x - writing speed or reading speed? Am I doing something wrong? Or this card is bad choice for replacing HDD? I really can't work now. Should I buy expensive SSD?

[sjthinkpader]

Yes, this is my experience using 133X Kingston CF card, too slow. The 233X RiDATA card is fast enough for running WinXP. I am using both 8GB and 32GB RiDATA cards at the moment. You can see from my benchmark data on various solutions:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=71881
The most important numbers are in the Random Write, large and small file sizes. Where the Kingston 133x card is the worst and intel 8GB SSD is next to the worst. The Sandisk 8GB SSD, RiDATA 8GB CF and RiDATA 32GB CF are decent. The Sandisk 32GB SSD is very fast.

There is a guy in Poland or Czech that wrote a write-cache program called Flashfire:
http://flashfire.org/xe/?mid=home

Some people have good results from it but it made file corruption on my test machine.
http://flashfire.org/forum/viewtopic.ph ... c0865249f9

[xDissident]

Thank you. So I need another card. What do you think, can this noname card provide such speeds as in the description:
25MB/sec. read, 20MB/sec. write
?
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-16GB-CF-16-GB-C ... 286.c0.m14

I think if it is true, 20MB/sec should be enough, but do all CF cards have poor random writing speed? I think this is my main problem of slow perfomance of Windows XP running on CF card.

Also I'll try Flashfire, but not now, cause I am using HDD in X40 at this moment.

[sjthinkpader]

Sorry, I edited my previous post but to answer your question:

"The most important numbers are in the Random Write, large and small file sizes; where the Kingston 133x card is the worst and intel 8GB SSD is next to the worst. The Sandisk 8GB SSD, RiDATA 8GB CF and RiDATA 32GB CF are decent. The Sandisk 32GB SSD is very fast."

Read speeds are never the problem as all of them are pretty fast.

Look for a RiDATA 233X CF card. They are not expensive and pretty fast. I got it from Newegg.com.

[sjthinkpader]

...
BUT there is a BIG problem
I've installed Windows XP SP3 (which took more time than with HDD) and got very slow perfomance. Card working in UDMA 5 mode, read speed is about 52-54 mbytes per second, BUT write speed is only about 11-13 mbytes per second. Some programs boot faster, but in common ThinkPad runs very very slow now, 2x slower than with standart 4200rpm HDD....

If your CF card had been used before, Write operation will be slow because the card controller will do Erase-Write where Erase takes a long time. You can try writing all "11111" data to free space in the card. This will ensure Write instead of Erase-Write. I use a program called Eraser and make a 1 pass operation with data pattern of "1111" to clean the free space.

All SSD including expensive ones are not immune to this as they become full of old data. Win7 has a new function call TRIM to do this automatically. But you can do this manually.

[mikeh]

200x means 200 x 150kB/s, so 30MB/s theoretical write speed.
Your 11-13 sound more like what I'd expect for a 133x card. Maybe you have a fake?

But it should not be a problem anyway if your OS caches writes. There is no reason for normal programs to be waiting on a write operation.
I believe MS-Windows automatically disables write caching for removable media, to reduce the risk from naive users removing a card prematurely.
I wonder if your OS (XP) is treating the flash drive as a removable card, causing the poor performance?

See "Device Manager, expand disk drives, right-click a drive and select Properties, select Policies, optimize for performance"

Are you saying it worked OK before you installed SP3?

There is no good reason why you should need a faster card. It won't fix an XP bug.
Hibernate will always be slow with a slow card, but does that matter? I just drop my laptop in the bag while it is still hibernating. X40s don't overheat too quickly
Actually, 2 minutes sounds way too much even at 10MB/s. How much memory is being written?

[sjthinkpader]

200x means 200 x 150kB/s, so 30MB/s theoretical write speed.
Your 11-13 sound more like what I'd expect for a 133x card.....

I think the new Class4/Class6 rating for SD cards are write speed.

CF cards ratings are not write speed yet. There is no way 600X cards can achieve 90MB write speed. Definitely my 233X cards cannot achieve 35MB write speed. They can achieve 35MB read speed. MLC flash write speed is terrible and some controllers are using 4 way interleaf plus large write cache.

Situation will get from bad to worse when the available space is not blank, field of 1111.., and the controller has to do erase before write. Then even the fast SSDs would slow to a crawl. So far only the intel M series SSD seems to have a good solution for this. Newer SSDs supporting TRIM function would do background erase-reclaim under Win7.

This was known in the late nighties and only now there are OS support to handle the slow erase/write issue. In those days, to improve write speed and increase number of write cycles for use in cellphones; a small amount of random (NOR) flash was combined with larger serial (NAND) flash. Frequent writes are then made in the NOR area and NAND is use for mostly read and infrequent writes such as ROM codes and phone number directories.

[mikeh]

CF cards ratings are not write speed yet.

Interesting. Yes, I was confusing with SDHC.
But the OP gets over 50MB/s read, which is well over 200x. Oh well, those numbers were always [censored] with CD-drives, which is where they originate.
Hey anon OP, is it possible you were measuring some sort of cached read speeds?

Can anyone support my impression that write-cache was not working (properly)?
Is this normally a problem with XP? (I use Linux)

<rant>P.S. What on earth is wrong with bovine excrement metaphors? We are not in kindergarten. Anybody seriously offended by a reference to a normal bodily function of a farm animal needs some therapy IMHO. </rant>

[sjthinkpader]

OT but...must be related to mad cow disease. You better be careful since you are exporting beef as well as we.