Thinkpads Forum

has anybody out there had sucess using a compact flash card as a hard drive? with the price of 8 gig cards less than $50, i want to try it. i bought an adapter (mini ide to cf) but had trouble. the
computer did not see it when booted. any tricks? and what brand of adapter worked for you. any help most appriciated. adrian

Hello Adrian,

unfortunately, I can't answer your question. However, I'm also thinking about replacing the hard disk in my 365XD for a CF to IDE interface with a 8Gb CF card.
So if anyone here has ever tried this, I would like to hear too if this works and what the maximum size CF card is I can use in my 365XD.

Kind regards,

Erik Meussen
The Netherlands
ThinkPads: 365XD, A31

i was sucsessfull in installing a cf card in place of my hard drive.
i bought one of those inexpensive converters off of e-bay. it worked just fine. (but would get one that holds two cards instead.
) what i learned is that if you want it to work well, purchase the FASTEST card you can get, and max out your ram.
i got a 8 gig card, it was purchased from frys for $50, with a $15
rebate, and was made by "a-data" . it is thier "speedy" brand of cards (and is not really very speedy). cf cards are rated by thier "x-speed" 1x is equal to a data transfer of 150 kilobites/secound
(the speed needed to transfer a photo to the card in one second
when the cards first came out, about a 1/8 meg file) so, a 10x card
reads/writes 1.5 megs/secound, a 100x card reads/writes at 15 megs/secound, and a 300x card reads/writes at 45 megs/secound.
your hard drive in your laptop reads/writes data at 66 megs/secound (ata 33=33 megs/secound, ata 66= 66 megs/secound. my cf a-data "speedy" card reads and writes in "pio mode 4" wich is a standard used BEFORE the DMA or ATA standard, its a 100x card that writes/reads at 16 megs/secound.
(thats less than 1/3 the speed of the hard drive it replaced). so it takes 3 times as long to boot, and 3 times as long to access/write
to programs. it also does not have U-DMA support (direct memory access) that the hard drives have. the fastest new cf cards (266x and 300x) are
UDMA capable, and would speed things up a lot more.
a 266x 8 gig UDMA capable cf card can be had for about $100,
a 300x card about $180.
one last thing, remeber to turn off the page file systime in xp,(thats why you need as much ram as you can get)
if you dont, xp keeps writing to the cf card, and you end up wearing out the card in just a few monthes. you should also consider turning off systim restore for the same reason.
in closing, you shure wont speed anything up going to a cf card
hard drive, but it shure is quieter, and a cf card uses 5% of the power. adrian

I'm also interested in doing something like this, thank you for all the details.

I need you to clear up some things, though. You first said "I bought an adapter (mini ide to cf) but had trouble. The computer did not see it when booted". Then you say "i was sucsessfull in installing a cf card in place of my hard drive. I bought one of those inexpensive converters off of e-bay". So what adapter didn't work, and which one did work? Can you please type the maker and model, or whatever it's written on the adapters? If it's the same one, how did you make it work?

when i first tried to use a cf card, i could not get it to work,
but in the end (after burning up 1 cf card, and about 10 hours of
trying, i did get it to work) the problem is that thier is no
instructions provided with the adapters, so it was a lot of trial and error for me. the adapter i purchased was a single cf adapter, from e-bay, it was very inexpensive, (under 10$) and shipped from hong-kong. the adapter i got had no markings for the #1 pin position, so i had trouble hooking it up. (when you look at your old hard drive, the pin closest to the master/slave jumper pins is the #1). the master/slave jumper pins are a set of 3 or 4 additional pins that are spaced slightly away from the other 40 pins. do NOT accidently hook the adapter to any of those master/slave jumpers. if you do, you will kill the cf card (go ahead, ask me how i know that!!) the CF card i used was a "a-data" brand and there "speedy" model. (actually one of the slowest cards they sell). it was a 8 gig card, and cost $50 at freys. the "speedy" line of A-data cards
only support P.I.O. mode data transfer, and has a maxium read-write speed of
16 mega-bits/sec. (in comparison, all current lap-top ide hard drives
are at least A.T.A. 66 or A.T.A. 100 (66 to 100 mega bits/sec. read/write) P.I.O. mode means "programable input-output"
and uses the cpu to controll ALL the data transfers. the fastes PIO mode supported by motherboards is mode 4, (16 mega bits/sec.) A.T.A. 33, 66, or 100
uses D.M.A. or Ultra D.M.A. modes to transfer data "Direct Memory Access". (D.M.A.)
uses mother board controllers to transfer data, freeing up the processor to do other things. Much faster! as stated in my other
post, my cf card is too slow to use. i will try it again with a sandisk
or transcend card (they both have ultra D.M.A. compatible cards that are virtually as fast as a hard drive, (but much more $$ than the CF card i got). and are fully compatible. do NOT
buy a lexar card, they are not CF compatible as a "fixed disk"
and wont work as a hard drive. one last thing, most older ibm laptops have a maxium data transfer speed of A.T.A. 33 so any card supporting ultra DMA mode 2 will be fine. when formating the card,
make shure to use a windows 98 start up disk to do it. on my
380z, it only supports a maxium boot partition between 7 amd 8 gigs. any excess drive area is ignored. after the operating systim is installed, the remainimg drive area can be
made a 2nd partition. (if you make the bootable partition larger
than what it sees on its own, the computer wont boot) i have used both 98se and xp on my cf card. the reason my 380z can't see more
than 7 or 8 gigs is that the motherboard bios does not support L.B.A.
(logical block addressing) and uses CHS instead (cylinders, heads,
and sectors) the maxium hard drive size "seen" is limited by those limitations. both xp and 98se support LBA up to 137 gigs, but
needs bios to detect and start the boot sector. after starting,
the O/S takes over. i dont know what the limitation is for a 240, but i know its not a problem on the 240x, or the 600x. any other questions,
ill be happy to answer. adrian

Hey Adrian, interesting stuff, thanks for all the info. I've been wondering about doing something like this on my 380z. I dont think I will though after reading your information. Thanks for taking the time to post what you found.

That's great information, just what I've been researching for my 240X.

I only need 8Gig and have been debating whether to go with CF verses a cheap SSD.

Tom's hardware has a good comparison on SSD drives, he uses one Samsung 32G ATA/66 and six SATA/150 drives in the tests, interesting reading, the power consumption, access time and read/write speed of the ATA/66 drive looks like a great upgrade for the 240X.

If I can find the Samsung model (MCBOE32G8APR) for a good price I'll go for it, if not I'll get the fastest 8G CF card and carrier I can find.

Forgot the link to the review.. http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12/17/ ... age10.html

CF cards wear out!? I thought they worked just like RAM!

These things are extremely popular in the 8-bit world, where the equivalent of Mac-OS for the Commodore 64 or Unix with a Mac-OS style gui for my Tandy Color Computer 3 are so well written they never crash unless you are using badly written amature freeware, and never fill up a 20-Meg drive. The 4-gig CF comonly used on these computers is supposed to be instant response, infinite capacity. I have not yet heard of a CoCo 3 wearing out a CF, and the controllers have been out for several years.

If they do wear out, I think I'll just stick with a fast, antique mecanical hard disk untill the technology grows up.

Depends on the usage, we have embedded linux systems running on 32M CF cards that have lasted 6 years without fault, then again there is not much writing going on.
Using a CF without some type of wear leveling will trash the card within a few months using it as swap or virtual memory.

Talking about antiquated CF/PCMCIA based systems, I have an Omnibook 300 (Win3.11) that's still running with a 2Mb CF card!!

Back from shopping.

Picked up an IDE to CF converter and a 266X 4G CF card. No SSD drives available off the shelf at the moment.

Also found a Thinkpad 240Z in the back of a second hand store in a pile of junk.

I picked up the fastest hard drive I could find, the cost of the 160G drive was similar to the 4G CF card!

IDE to CF converter has on extra pin (PIN 20) on the IDE side, no indecation which side I have to remove the pin from, no markings on the converter.

I plan to use a 32M CF card to check the correct orientation of the converter card. If I can mount it I'm go for the 4G card.


PS. The 240Z I'm writing this post on has ethernet, 192M RAM, Celeron 500Mhz and the SVGA display, bummer about the display but it was too cheap to leave alone

Thanks, Adrian.

actually the latest word i've heard was that nowadays controllers and flash chips have become much sturdier. Bottom line is, if you get a not-too-cheap flash card, no matter how you use it (even swapping), it will live longer than a harddisk.

anyway, if anybody got a 240 (not 240x, not 240z) to boot from CF, please tell me! this is quite important for me.

thanks in advance.

Nomo, I've tried installing on 240X and 240Z, both work, I'm not sure but these instructions should work on a 240 using a hard drive or Ultra DMA capable CF card. (Acronis Disc cloning software works for hard drives but not for CF cards for some reason in case you are wondering why I did not use ghost or disc imaging software)

Installing a RI Data 4G 266X CF Drive in Thinkpad 240X or 240Z

What you need, one fast UDMA CF card that is 266X or greater, one CF to 2.5" IDE adapter, one floppy drive and a Windows CD.

1. Download Windows 98 SE boot disk from www.bootdisk.com
2. Write image to floppy
3. Remove existing hard drive and carrier, insert CF adapter and boot from floppy.
4. Run fdisk and delete all the partitions on the CF drive, create new primary partition, size 3Gig, create secondary partition 860Mb
5. Set drive C as active and reboot from floppy.
6. Format C drive and D drive using "format c: /s" and "format d:" the /s will copy the boot image from the floppy to the C drive so that C drive is bootable.
7. After formatting C and D drives copy all files from the floppy to C, "copy a:*.* c:" don't overwrite command.com. this will allow you to run smartdrv.exe from C drive.
8. Remove CF drive and place in external USB drive case, connect to another PC and copy i386 folder from the XP installation CD to the second partition of the CF card.
9. Reinstall CF card and boot the 240 without the floppy attached, at the C prompt type "smartdrv.exe" then again type "smartdrv.exe" to check that smartdrv is running.
10. Change directory to D:/i386 and type "winnt" this will start the Windows XP installation.
11. Install XP onto C drive and convert to NTFS.


HD Tach from before and after, Specs, original drive was a 10G 4200RPM model. XP boots much faster.

10Gig 4200RPM
Access time 21ms
Read 20.8M/sec

RI Data 266X 4Gig CF card
Access time 2.4ms
Read 26.5M/sec

Samsung 160Gig 5400RPM
Access time 15.5ms
Read 31.5M/sec


Now I'm tweeking XP and installing essential software, CF drive is highly defragmented after installation.


Will report on speed and battery life after customizing.


YMMV

thanks obpsym,

i will further look into the issue.

i already equipped all kinds of computers with cf cards because i also do modding projects such as car computers etc. because of that, i already have some experience with cf card harddisk replacements.

by the way, i just bought an x24 and will try the conversion with this notebook too. if it also fails, i know for sure that my adapter is faulty (which is one possible reason that the conversion didn't work with the 240).

Another hint:
Since flash memory has virtually zero access time, fragmentation doesn't matter at all. In fact, there are specially designed file systems to minimize flash wear leveling which try not to reuse the same blocks but distribute writing all over the flash disk, therefore creating fragmentation. I didn't experience any slowdowns with this file system at all.

my nokia 770 internet tablet has internal flash memory and uses this file system.

For some reason after a reboot the CF card is dog slow, I checked the IDE mode and ithe settings are, Auto, DMA if available, PIO Mode.

I only get 4.5M/sec throughput now compared to 25M/sec previously.

Any ideas how to change the IDE Mode from PIO Mode to UDMA?

Thinkpad 240Z, Celeron 500Mhz, XP/SP2

Many thanks.

Answering my own question,

Followed this link and edited the registry value for the Master IDE.

http://sniptools.com/tipstricks/getting ... windows-xp

After a re-boot the IDE mode is back to ULTRA DMA - Mode 2 and the machine is speedy again.

HD-Tach is now reporting 26.9MB/sec access time is still 2.5ms

nomo wrote:i just bought an x24 and will try the conversion with this notebook too. if it also fails, i know for sure that my adapter is faulty (which is one possible reason that the conversion didn't work with the 240).

The x24 arrived and the adapter works fine (tho not perfect yet). Since the x24 doesn't have an optical drive too, I installed the OS via USB directly to the cf card.

So my 240 isn't meant to run from cf.

As a newby here I read all your posts and wanted to try them on my 240 and 240X.

Result: the 240X works with a CF adapter and 4Gb Adata 133x CF card, even with the double one, but with only 1 card installed, boot faillure when putting second CF card in.
So I modded the harddisk cover to hold the single CF adapter and card and it works fine.

Now I want to upgrade to a 288x Samsung 32Gb card, for that would make my 240x with W2K even beter for my purposes.
Costs onlt 71 Euro, that compared to a SSD with 258 is still cheap!

Attaching the same adapter with w98se installed in the 240, it said not suitable bootdrive and for that this Celeron 300 based 240 is very different from the 240X, I guess it is not possible.

It was though in my X21, works just fine, upgraded the OS to W2K on FAT 32 and still it works fine.

I even placed a Atheros AR5005BG wifi card in the 240X mini pci and that also works fine, no overheating! only a bit of a job placing the antenna wires!

240X 2609-61g P3-500, 192Mb, 4Gb CF, Atheros AR5005BG wifi, Screen type B, W2K pro, large battery +3 hours

Grtz Lino Lampers

Hi All,

I've just recently acquired a Sandisk Extreme IV 8GB and the addonics dual cf-ide adapter for my 240x PIII 500.

However, after ghosting the image of my current 20GB hitachi hdd and then cloning it into the CF card using the Sandisk CF Card.

For some reasons, it's dog slow and I mean like real slow, it takes a few minutes for the start menu to appear after clicking on start.

I've checked to see if my primary IDE bus is set to DMA and it does not appear to be operating under PIO mode...

Any ideas on what might be the reason?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Cheers

I'm thinking about changing my 240X HDD to a CF as well, but just a couple of questions first:

What type of CF to IDE adapter should be used?

CF to IDE 2.5" I suppose, but does the # of pins factor in to this? (240X's are 44 pin correct?)

Also, the shape factor should be just like the Addonics model as per this url?:

http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_ ... midecf.asp

I was thinking about getting it off "that auction site (eBay)" but wasn't too sure as to what to look out for.

Any advise would be much appreciated!

I have been spending a whole lot of time trying to get my 240 to accept a CF card at IDE slot. I have both 600x and 240 and wanted to change both to use CF so bought two adapters. The 600x took it very well (though I still need to tweak the disk speed), I have puppy linux running on it. However, 240 has been resisting all the CF cards that I have. I tried the below CF's with no success:
- Lexar Professional 300x 4GB
- Sandisk Extreme III 30MB/s 8GB
- PQI Hi-Speed 120 2GB
- Lexar Media 4x 48MB (very old)

I have tried as master, slave, cable select just in case one of them would work. I also tried formatting the CF in different ways:
- dd a win98se floppy image directly on to the card
- format using HP utility as bootable and copy win98se files over
- partition using puppy linux and install as usb as well as do a manual install
- took a dd copy of the working image from 600 onto an identical card.
- even inserted the CF with the adapter into a desktop using a 44-pin to 40-pin adapter and installed puppy as IDE. (and was able to boot the desktop too, verifying that the adapter is actually working fine).

I also tried using Plop bootmanager and WakePup floppy boots in case they would find the IDE and the puppy install on it, but no luck. On top of that Plop and WakePup both failed to boot a puppy installed usb flashdrive. I also tried to boot a few other "linux on usb" installs using Plop, but they all hang right while loading the kernel (on the other hand, Plop successfully booted a few linux distros from usb on the 600).

After reading this thread, I also booted from win98se floppy and ran fdisk, but it is very clear about not finding any fixed disks.

After trying all of this, I replaced my hard drive back, just to make sure I haven't damaged one of the connectors, and it booted happily.

Is buying a different CF model the only option, or did I miss anything else to try? Could a different brand of CF really make that much difference here? Should I try a different brand of adapter? I would appreciate any ideas.

Hi,

Have a look at: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 79&start=0.

It works!!!!!

oski

Thanks oski, I posted in your other thread for some clarifications.

I finally purchased a used Transcend 8gb 120x card off ebay and it was immediately recognized, so it is a big relief after wasting so much time with other cards.