Re: cf as a ssd ?

"Voytek Eymont" <[email protected]> writes:

> I've got a netbook with a 160GB HD, I'm tempted replacing the HD with a SSD,
> as the cost of 'proper' SSD is somewhat above what I'm willing to pay, I'm
> considering getting a SATA/CF adapter with a CF card, (as well as getting
> IDE/CF for desktop use)

You are probably not going to have good performance results from that.

> any using CF card(s) as SSD ?

In so far as I have used them as a HDD replacement in the past, before the
whole SSD thing took off, yeah.

> what are the downsides ?

I can't comment on the SATA bridge chips, but historically the performance of
the CF cards was pretty poor, especially for random writes.  They did OK for
bulk streaming writes, of course, since that was what they were tuned for.

If the SATA bridge requires PIO access to the CF card, expect very poor
performance.  If it is more like a USB adapter, handling that on the card, you
might do OK.

The traditional PATA adapters for CF cards only exposed PIO mode, so were
pretty expensive to run in terms of performance and CPU load.

> life expectancy of a CF card as a SSD ?

That should be fine.  Just make sure you have backups.

> I'm hoping for performance and power saving gains

You are probably unlikely to see much of either in practice, I fear, but don't
let that stop you.  Test it and see how things perform with your hardware.

Regards,
        Daniel
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