How to migrate from slow Hitachi drive to CF Card.

[greg.billings]

So I bought a CF-IDE adapter for my X41 tablet and a 533X 32GB CF card, whole thing cost me $120 so I thought good deal.

Installed Windows 7 Pro on my 60GB Hitachi - everything works great. Now the CF card has arrived and now I want to clone or image my drive to the CF card. Bought a USB CF adapter and acronis won't recognize it as a "drive".

Anyone had experience with what I am trying to accomplish and perhaps the best way to go about it?

I'd like to have the hidden system partition created during Win 7 install and the C: drive. I would rather not re-install everything.


Thanks,

Greg

[sjthinkpader]

You will need to place the CF/adapter in the HDD slot and the original Hitachi 60GB in a USB housing or Ultrabay tray. If Acronis cannot recognize the CF card, you may need to use a Super FDISK to create the MBR first.

[jtt3011]

Only just seen your post ............

My oldish version 7 of Migrate Easy - part of True Image suite - will not recognise USB memory sticks, even when when formatted NTFS and with installed boot sector and MBR.

Hopefully you'll have found some other solution by now.

[greg.billings]

Well, I got the CF hard drive working. I used an external usb 2.5" HD enclosure for the Hitachi drive and put the CF Card in it's adapter in the HD slot.

I had the Hitachi 60GB drive partitioned into two drives, made a backup using acronis. Used a recovery cd created by acronis, put my X41 into my X4 dock and was able to restore to the CF card.

Windows 7 found a new device on bootup, found an ATA device. Re-ran Windows Experience and went from 3.5 on the disk transfer rate to 5.9. But, the laptop seems slow. Downloaded SSD Tweaker and that seemed to help but performance sees sluggish. I run a database program and it using lots of reads to load the sql db into memory. Takes about the same amount of time. I wonder if I have the right driver installed. I have turned off defrag, index, etc. etc. The HD light seems on all the time. Drive is formated as NTFS - I wonder if FAT is any better.

Anyone shed anylight?

I had a UMID MBook and used a piece of software that solved the stalling problem and I wonder if it would work in this case but I can't remember what it's called.

If anyone has any ideas on how I can tweak performance that would be great.

Update: tried flashfire, not much difference. I read there are some pins to tape off to force udma support?

[sjthinkpader]

You need to turn off prefetch too. This is much harder to do. What is the brand, model of the CF card?

[greg.billings]

It's an A-Data 533X card, product packaging says its supports UDMA.

Ran CrystalMark 3.0

Read / Write
Seq, 66.40 / 24.72
512K 68.11 / 1.763
4K 12.56 / 0.262
4KQD32 12.31 / 0.294

Edit : Did some looking around, looks like my read speeds are excellent but it's the write speed thats the problem, especially in the 512Kb and 4K. I guess that's a chipset issue on the card or the CF adapter?

[sjthinkpader]

Yes, try to exchange the it for a Kingston 266x card.

[greg.billings]

Hmm, I can try, what kind of speeds will I get off the kingston? 266x cards should run 38MB/sec transfer, is the kingston getting this on write speeds as well?

[astroidea]

This probably has nothing to do with your issue, but how much ram do you have?
I have the kingspec SSD, and whenever virtual memory is being used, my computer nearly locks up, probably due to the jmicron slow random read/write issue.
With 2GB ram added in, the thing runs smooth and quick.
BTW for $120, you could've gotten a kingspec SSD.

[sjthinkpader]

Hmm, I can try, what kind of speeds will I get off the kingston? 266x cards should run 38MB/sec transfer, is the kingston getting this on write speeds as well?

You can find this info in the Benchmark thread, Feb 9th post:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 1&start=60
I tried a few other CF cards, Patriot, PNY etc. Wound up returning them.

[greg.billings]

Thanks for the link. Seems the 4KB test is the hardest for CF cards to handle - is that the main issue for day to day performance or is th 512KB test a better number to go with?

[sjthinkpader]

Modern browsers write a lot of little files. Other operations such as paging writes larger files.

[billp117]

I used an A-Data 233x with an IDE CF adapter...and ran into the same problems. After finally formatting the CF card with Fat-32 I was able to do a normal installation of Windows XP. My system was an X40 using a USB DVD drive. The CF drive ran just a fast of the 40 GB Hitachi.