Thinkpads Forum

Can't get myself to trade up to a T61 and sacrifice portability. Aside from waiting for SSD Drives to come down, are there any PCMCIA cards that can act as a NTFS Hard Drive with speeds comparable to a 7200 rpm Hard Disk?

YES, I have an Ultrabase, YES I have some external USB and Firewire Drives, but am looking to make my set up as portable as possible.

How fast are SD Cards and CF Cards. I remember reading here that even with the CF - PCMCIA adapters, the read/write speeds are excruciatingly slow.

Any suggestions sans sarcasm? I don't care about capacity as long as I can work with at least maybe 4GB. I could always swap files between this "drive" and where I store files permanently.

Thanks in advance.

I think the fastest CF cards are around 40MB/s read/write. The 7200rpm drive is probably better than that, except in access times. I think the avg price for a 4GB CF with those speeds is $100. ~$180 for 8GB.

I believe SD cards are a bit slower in reads and noticeably slower in writes compared to CF.

My cheapo 8gb usb flash drive gets about 30MB/s read and 10MB/s writes.

Until the most recent BIOS update, the read/write speeds over the pccard interface as well as the SD-interface were really bad on the X61/s due to some problem with the integrated RICOH chip (which handled the I/O). I do not know if the X60/s series suffers from the same problem (they have not received a BIOS update that addresses that issue).

If your looking for a fast CF-solution you need not only pay attention to the CF-card itself but also to CF-adapter. There are less than a handful of CF-adapters that manage transfer rates in excess of 10MB/s (I think Delkin has one of them).

Also, most CF-cards are MLC, which means that their write durability is not on par with SLC SSDs, nor MLC SSDs with more advanced wear-levelling algorithms.