Thinkpad 240 Hard Drive Connecter for CF <$10 + 15 min mod

[wolfrb]

For anyone who has a Thinkpad 240 without the hard drive connecter, you can modify a 1.8" IDE to compact flash adapter and use a CF card with "fixed disk mode" for a poor man's SSD. Just cut off (carefully!) the three pairs of female pin holes to the left of the marked "pin 1". Remove any loose metal pin material. Next, snip/cut off the plastic guide on the right of the adapter. Now carefully trim and round both ends and trim the ridges on the top and bottom of the connecter. Finally, trim the left side of the "board" flush with the compact flash guide arm. Insert your "fixed disk mode" CF card in the adapter, turn the adapter "upside down" (CF label facing down) and, with good lighting, line up the Thinkpad's pins with the adapter's holes and insert. If it doesn't slide right in, carefully do a little more trimming. Secure the back end with some good quality electrical or duct tape.

I have done two of these so far and both TP's have been running great for three weeks with Windows 2000 + SP4. Boot time is a little slow at about 1.5 minutes, but I haven't tweaked anything yet. "Industrial" compact flash card specs indicate much better potential life than the regular ones and 4GB Stec cards, while a bit slow and small, run $15 to $20. I will try to get some pictures ready next week if anybody is interested.

Thanks to all of you members who share their knowledge on how to keep our TP 240's running and productive!

[BillMorrow]

good post and mod..

thanks for sharing this with other members..

[oski]

Hi,

Tested in a 240x and a240 and works great!!! Is good news for 240 owners.
Just waiting for a cheap fast card to use because the one I have (8GB, unbranded) is veeeery slooooow.

Tks wolfrb for the idea and for sharing it with us.

What OS are you running. I will try win98SE and pclinuxos MiniMe.

Cheers

[wolfrb]

I am running Windows 2000 on a 4gb Stec Mach1 compact flash card. Windows 2000 gives me some of the features of XP without the bloat. Stec Mach1's (66x industrial) are slow, but specs say they should have good life.
Puppy Linux (small footprint with lots of features) sets up and runs well also.

[NautTboy]

I'd also tried CF for HD on a desktop and dislike it much. I have one 8gb brought from ebay claim to be fast 133x or something like that. Tried it on AMD Duron 950 socket A 462 with 1g Ram. I just couldn't stand the delay, another word very slow. Compare to my other socket a 462 but 900mhz with only 382 ram, this was way faster with less mhz and mb. I'd also was gonna put in my i1200, but not no more.

[virge]

@NauTboy: I've never tried a CF as a primary drive before, but I'm looking into it for my old TP560E. From what I've read, 133x is too slow. It seems like the favorites are 266x and 300x for the OS drive.

[wolfrb]

While I understand there are many 266x and 300x cards out there, I don't think you are going to find one with the 2,000,000 read/write cycles of the Stec Mach1 cards at only $15 to $20. Most of these are listed at only 100,000 read/write cycles and run $60.00+. The "industrial" cards with 1,000,000+ cycles and 250x+ speeds are still a bit expensive. If money is no object, Stec makes a Mach4 500x card that puts many of the others to shame, but if money is no object then there may better platforms to work with.

I believe this is a problem with OS's that like to write back very frequently to the "hard drive". I am experimenting with with Puppy Linux, which does not have a lot of "write cycles", using a Transcend 4GB 266x card. Anyone else who has had more experience with the "write cycles vs card life" issues, let us know.
I could be wrong on my assumptions, wouldn't be the first time and certainly not the last time.

BTW, I have no vested interest in Stec, it is just the best for the dollars I have found so far.

[oski]

Hi,

Following your comments installed in my 8GB CF w2k and pclinuxos MiniMe.

I will test both with, for example the same browser, Opera, and see how it goes.

hpdarm -tT /dev/hda indicates an average of 14MB/sec, quiete far from a normal old hdd, that I think is ~30-40MB/sec, in pclinux. Will test in w2k with HDTech

Cheers

[sb102]

hi, wolfrb

I have a question for you: could you post a picture of the adapter AFTER the modification (I just got a 240x with no HDD caddy and I am unable to find one on Polish internet auctions), as I do not want to mess something up during the mod.

Thanks in advice,
sb102

[wolfrb]

I will charge up the digital camera tonight and do a quick set of pictures from start to finish tomorrow.

The best/least expensive option will be to buy the adapter from one of the international sellers (Hong Kong) taking 6 to 10 business days for shipping. Type in the ebay search box: "1.8 ide" adapter.

So far I have just used the "green and white" ones, but the black and white models will probably work also.

[wolfrb]

Bill says we don't host pics on this site. If any one would like to see a quick set of photos ( 6 ) email me at randellbutler@yahoo.com

[pkiff]

wolfrb sent me the photos and I've posted them on his behalf here:
http://thinkpads.kiff.ca/images/rbutler ... 1-crop.JPG
http://thinkpads.kiff.ca/images/rbutler/CIMG4442.JPG
http://thinkpads.kiff.ca/images/rbutler/CIMG4448.JPG
http://thinkpads.kiff.ca/images/rbutler/CIMG4449.JPG
http://thinkpads.kiff.ca/images/rbutler/CIMG4451.JPG
http://thinkpads.kiff.ca/images/rbutler/CIMG4453.JPG

I will probably leave these up permanently unless wolfrb requests they be removed.

Phil.

[sb102]

A huge thank you for both wolfrb (for taking the pictures) and pkiff (for posting them). I've ordered one of the adaptors via a polish auction site (but the price that I paid for it is pure overkill). I hope that it's going to work.

[irha]

Thanks for posting the steps with pictures, and thanks for referring me here from my other post.

I am a little confused on why this would work when I am having trouble with a regular CF to IDE-44 adapter. The way I use it, I still have the original harddrive connector in tact, so it is a simple matter of connecting the CF to IDE-44 adapter to it, just like a laptop hard drive. I am thinking the problem is that bios is too picky about a CF that can emulate a fixed disk and none of my CF's have that ability. I heard Sandisk had a utility to turn on that mode (and I have one of the Sandisk cards to try), but I couldn't find that anywhere to download and their support wouldn't give that utility anymore. After following this thinkwiki article I decided to give one of the suggested CF cards a try, and so just ordered a Transcend 8gb card. I hope this will work as it is known to come with fixed disk mode.

If the Transcend card also fails to recognize, I am willing to give your method a try, but you seem to indicate the drive needs to run fixed disk mode anyway, and in my case none of my cards seem to be capable of it, so the Transcend card that I just ordered will probably come handy.

BTW, could you explain why we need to trim the pin holes? Is it because it wouldn't fit otherwise, or would that automatically make any CF appear in fixed disk mode (sorry, it was not clear, if you meant this or that the CF itself should support fixed disk prior to using it here)? Also, would the below adapter work?

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.10886

[MAZter]

Great mod, very easy!