Change old low HDD to a CF card?

[trodas]

Segate 13G ST313021A on Pentium 90 @ 125MHz:

Average - 6.4MB/sec - now this is SPEEED!

...

I wonder, if anyone have in operation slower HDD

...

Therefore I wonder, if someone have a experience with replacing such SLOOOW HDDs with PATA to CF adapter and CF card(s)? The latest models promise very fast speeds - 160MB/sec is quite above PATA possibilities:

SanDIsk Extreme PRO 32G CF card

...and since the adapters are just wires, connecting the CF card to PATA interface (CF cards work on same PATA interface!) and only in best cases, you can choose the voltage (3.3V or 5V) and you get the power and activity lights:

DeLock 91620 PATA to CF

...then there should not be any problem of using CF cards as old PATA HDD replacement(s). Only problem I hear, that there should be changed bit on the card somewhere, that change the device type from removable to fixed. Then it should act as normal HardDriveDevice.

But maybe I missed something...? Do anyone have experience with this? Could someone share tips, software for the change (from removable to fixed) and experience in general?

 

[trodas]

Well, since SanDisk is not going to reply, I tried with the default 5V setting the DeLock adapter I mentioned earlier with very old, 0.5G CF card SanDisk SDCFH. It does support PIO 4, but no DMA and the speed is very slow:

Tested on ASRock 775Dual-VSTA (P4, 3.8GHz WinXP, alligned). Also works (or more precisely, get detected) on the target Asus TXP4-X, so so far, so good. Except the speed, lol.

Now the question is - what voltage to use for the SanDisk Extreme PRO 32G CF card and how to change the removable bit to fixed, so there will be the caching in Windows possible.

 

[RejZoR]

This is really bad performance. Even old HDD's perform better than this.

 

[GreiverBlade]

from http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/idecf.html

"All IDE-CF adapters I've used have come with a jumper for setting both master/slave/cable select and most allow setting the CF card voltage (3.3V or 5V). Nearly all modern cards take both, however I have run into some older cards that only operate at 5V. 3.3V is safer to start with, and if you run into issues, you can bump it up to 5V"

This is really bad performance. Even old HDD's perform better than this.

if you read :

I tried with the default 5V setting the DeLock adapter I mentioned earlier with very old, 0.5G CF card SanDisk SDCFH.

then it should be obvious.

 

[RejZoR]

It won't be much better with newer ones. Memory card controllers are designed for sequential read/write, random usually stuffs them...

 

[Aquinus]

Considering CPU usage, I would call the speed a result of high CPU load. The CPU probably can't handle more...

 

[newtekie1]

It won't be much better with newer ones. Memory card controllers are designed for sequential read/write, random usually stuffs them...

Flash memory, paired with a good controller, can easily handle random reads/writes. The old controllers sucked, the new ones are much better. Heck, I have USB Flash drives with sub-1ms latency.

 

[RejZoR]

Like I said, memory card may have sub 1ms access time for single commands and sequential read/write, but as soon as you'll expect more from it, it'll just stuff itself. Memory card controllers simple aren't designed for such operation.

 

[newtekie1]

Latency is the measure of time between multiple commands...

 

[RejZoR]

Yeah, how did that work with cheap SSD's again? Now take memory cards and treat them as 100 times more primitive controllers.

 

[newtekie1]

Yeah, how did that work with cheap SSD's again? Now take memory cards and treat them as 100 times more primitive controllers.

Worked fine, they were still way faster in use than any HDD.

 

[trodas]

I tried the voltage and the good news are, that SanDisk Extreme PRO 32G CF card works well with 3.3V settings! There are the result, enabling Smart a 32bit mode transfer did nothing, PATA133 is supported, but it is not going to get higher. Sadly. Still, I think that this is a reasonable speed improvement:

However, now to bad news. The CF card is completely useless, unless someone tell me how to change the removable bit to fixed. Period. You cannot use the CF card for anything w/o that. Two examples:

I use Mini Tool Partition Wizard Pro to setup the drive on boot CD - it let me allign the partitions - when creating second partition (one 4G FAT32 for OS, rest for DATA and NTFS = usable settings for waza), it tells me, that I cannot use that partition under Win, as Win recognize only ONE partition on removable device. I was like... that it is, I'm screwed.

So for lolz, I started the install. It want well even at 83MHz FSB with the ATI Rage XL card (IDE HDD refused to work under such conditions, it worked only when S3 Trio64 is used at that clock), but then I get to the drive partitioning and problems arise. D partition is invisible (unpartioned space, lol) and there is no way to create a new partition there, because on removable drive, only one partition is supprted. So OK, I try installing and using only the 4G partition... but no! It cannot install, because this partition is NOT compatible with WinXP.

So basicaly, w/o the change from removable to fixed, any usage of any CF card as HDD replacement is doomed.

...

I'm quite mad at SanDisk - they should rename themselves as ScamDisk, because they are selling not CF cards, but CF compatible *) cards, with the *) exception for the possibility to change removable to fixed bit. I believe, that there is open possibility to lawsuit against SanDisk and any other CF card producing company, that produces products, that does not meet the CF card specifications. Because this is false advertising and misleading labeling of product. This is not a CF card, period.

 

[Aquinus]

I'm quite mad at SanDisk - they should rename themselves as ScamDisk, because they are selling not CF cards, but CF compatible *) cards, with the *) exception for the possibility to change removable to fixed bit. I believe, that there is open possibility to lawsuit against SanDisk and any other CF card producing company, that produces products, that does not meet the CF card specifications. Because this is false advertising and misleading labeling of product. This is not a CF card, period.

Says the guy who is using removable media as something quite differently on old hardware with an old operating system? Huh. Interesting. Much better numbers now though.

 

[R-T-B]

There used to be a tool to toggle the removable bit. Try contacting SanDisk maybe?

 

[newtekie1]

I'm quite mad at SanDisk - they should rename themselves as ScamDisk, because they are selling not CF cards, but CF compatible *) cards, with the *) exception for the possibility to change removable to fixed bit. I believe, that there is open possibility to lawsuit against SanDisk and any other CF card producing company, that produces products, that does not meet the CF card specifications. Because this is false advertising and misleading labeling of product. This is not a CF card, period.

AFAIK, the ability of the end user to change the fixed/removable bit is not a requirement of the CF standard. The standard simply says that the CF Card can be either fixed or removable, not that it is selectable by the end user.