X40 owners - what brand CF card and adapter do you use?

[catback]

I'm trying to compile a list of compact flash cards and CF to IDE adapters that work and don't work in the X40. If you have either, please list the model number and any general comments on it's performance.

[Neil]

Pretty sure mine is the ever popular and cheap V.B1 adapter from Hong Kong, but I'm not going to remove it to check for sure. According to Thinkwiki, it "works but there is no guarantee of performance". I would agree with that. Mine works, but performance is rather poor...so I wouldn't recommend it, especially if you plan on using Windows. Linux performance has been fine as far as i can tell.

[catback]

Any idea what model CF card you're using? How's it's performance?

[Neil]

It's a Transcend 400X 16GB card. Like I wrote above, performance is poor, but I figure it's more because of the adapter than because of the card I'm using, but I don't know for sure. Main problem is it takes anywhere from three or four minutes, up to as much as ten minutes to boot. Not just to desktop, but to a fully usable system. Then it will seem to work fine most of the time, but occasionally there are rather long pauses where it seems the system is not responding, but it's just slowly going about it's business. I use the system almost every day, but sometimes it can be rather frustrating.

[ThinkRob]

If the adapter doesn't do any caching or other trickery of its own -- and AFAIK most don't -- then it's pretty much up to the card's performance. And since most CF cards are heavily optimized towards sequential reads/writes, it's no surprise that random IO is... lacking.

[SailingAway]

I have a 16GB class 10 microSDHC card. Would there be any performance benefit with using this in conjunction with a microSDHC to CF adapter available on Amazon?

[sjthinkpader]

There are SD-PATA adapters. But the setup is almost unusable.

[norm39]

I took a very low-cost approach by installing a Transcend 4 GB 133x CF card ($13, Willoughby's) with a "CF-IDE44/2.0MM ADAPTER V.H2" ($3, DealExtreme, China) in an x40 ($34, eBay). I'm running Tiny Core Linux in "frugal" mode so that the CF is accessed only twice: when the computer is turned on and the entire operating system and all apps are loaded from the CF into memory, and at shutdown when preferences, browsing history, etc. are saved. The system boots up in about 40 seconds with all applications (browser, wireless, editor, etc.) ready to go. The result is convenient side-table Internet access for answering questions like "Where have we seen that actress before?"

Note that when this adapter is installed correctly the label side of the CF faces downward.