Thinkpads Forum

I'd like to either use an SD card OR use a PCMICIA to CF adapter to do some audio work and storage. I've heard the the SD Card Slot is VERY slow. What I don't know is the following about the PCMCIA port.

1) If I use a PCMCIA to CF adpater, is the read/write speed fast, or dependent upon the card?

2) If I use one of these adapters, will the CF card show up as a removable drive, or as a separate new hard drive? (Say if I used 16GB)?

In case you are CLUELESS as to what I'm referring to, here are some links so you can see these:


1) http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid ... Categories

2) http://cgi.ebay.com/Socket-CF-II-TO-PCM ... 1|294%3A50



Thanks a lot for answering my questions and Happy New Year.

I don't know the answers to your questions but if that doesn't work out you could use the media base with a second hard drive. You can get a rather large 7200RPM SATA drive that will read and write plenty fast enough for multitrack recording. I have had much better luck with this method than using an external USB 2.0 SATA drive. I have had some hiccups during playback from a USB drive, which I have never experienced with the Second HD. I have been told there must have been something else causing my problem, but I didn't bother trying to figure it out. It's always a good idea to optimize an audio computer for the task at hand.

epu wrote:I'd like to either use an SD card OR use a PCMICIA to CF adapter to do some audio work and storage. I've heard the the SD Card Slot is VERY slow. What I don't know is the following about the PCMCIA port.

1) If I use a PCMCIA to CF adpater, is the read/write speed fast, or dependent upon the card?

2) If I use one of these adapters, will the CF card show up as a removable drive, or as a separate new hard drive? (Say if I used 16GB)?

In case you are CLUELESS as to what I'm referring to, here are some links so you can see these:


1) http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid ... Categories

2) http://cgi.ebay.com/Socket-CF-II-TO-PCM ... 1|294%3A50



Thanks a lot for answering my questions and Happy New Year.

Hi,

I don't have the exact answer of speed comparisons however in this case, i do not believe you will hit the bus speeds for those ports but rather the speeds of the CFlash and SD memory.
I currently use the SDCard slot and a compact flash via a cardbus pcmcia CF adapter to off load 4~8GB of files in a few minutes if copying to the HD.
Since most of the files are raw files from my camera, I normally work/process the files on the compact flash then export the final photos to the HD in jpg. Each raw file is about 10-20MB and each card hold hundreds of them.

I have not ran into speed issues doing this however I am using a 30MB/s CF card and a cardbus pcmcia CF adapter which is a 32bit adapter. The link you posted doesn't indicate it's a cardbus so most likely would be very slow, and your bottle neck along w/ the 80X speed of the flash memory. 80X is pretty slow, 133X is kind of slow imo but it's not bad. Try to look for 200X+ if you can.

So to recap about the URL you've posted on the two issues i see.
1) the CF card is only 80x speed (aprox 12MB/s)
2) the pcmcia adapter is not a cardbus, so would be slow.

Summary, If you go with a descent memory sticks (200X+), the speed should be just fine... it's normally not the laptop, unless it's a T40 via a USB1 for example.

I use the following and can unload 8GB of files in about 3-4 minutes.

SanDisk Extreme III (30MB/s) via a cardbus pcmcia adapter.
Remember to look up the write speeds as well, some brands have a slower write speed than their advertised read speeds.

I use the viking cardbus pcmcia and the driver works fine w/ Vista business.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0323894826

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820171342

Hope this helps,
Mo