I just bought an IDE-CF adapter the other day with the intention of
replacing the spinning rust in my disk imaging system (which is some
early/mid-90s 80486-based thing).
However, the CF entry on Wikipedia says:
"Most CompactFlash flash-memory devices limit wear on blocks by varying the
physical location to which a block is written. When using CompactFlash in
ATA mode to take the place of the hard disk drive, wear leveling becomes
critical because low-numbered blocks contain tables whose contents change
frequently. Current CompactFlash cards spread the wear-leveling across the
entire drive. The more advanced CompactFlash cards will move data that
rarely changes to ensure all blocks wear evenly."
... I'm a little wary about the way it says "most CF cards", implying that
there are some out there which don't do any wear-leveling at all. So, the
obvious question: is there a way of knowing which cards are going to be
good and which are useless as IDE replacements? Maybe by age, capacity,
manufacturer? I'd prefer not to invest time into setting software up only
to find that the card fails in a matter of weeks.
cheers
Jules
