On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Florian Philipp < li...@f_philipp.fastmail.net> wrote:
> Grant schrieb: > <snip> > >> You don't need to buy SSD "drives" - instead you could use CF cards and > a > >> cheap adaptor. These are commensurate in capacity & cost with USB flash > >> drives (4gig, maybe 16gig?), but CF cards "talk EIDE" and you can get > cheap > >> pin-convertors allowing you to connect them to EIDE cables and treat > them > >> like a hard-drive. > > > > Aren't CF cards much slower than SSD drives and HD drives? > > > <snip> > > If you really need to write to the CFDisk, make sure to buy one with DMA > support (and no, the label "super fast" which is regularly found on > these things does not necessarily mean that it supports DMA). One thing to watch out for if you do go the CF/DMA route - be careful what CF<->IDE/SATA adapter you buy - in an embedded control system project I worked on a few years ago, we went CF + adapter for the primary OS driver, got a super-fast 4GB CF card, and couldn't use the speed of it at all, because the cheapo CF adapter we got was so electrically noisy across the physical adapter pins, that DMA reads/writes would fail, and the speed would get auto-reduced to PIO. Very, very, very annoying. If you get a CF adapter, make sure to spend the extra $5-20 (or however much, I haven't priced in quite a while) to get something that will be compatible with the transfer speeds that you are wanting to use. -James
