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Coffee House => Coffee House Boards => CH / Science and Technology => Topic started by: motorollin on September 05, 2008, 02:25:26 PM

Title: CF card *slower* than IDE HDD
Post by: motorollin on September 05, 2008, 02:25:26 PM

I have put a 16GB Transcend CF card in a CF->IDE adapter and am using it in a G4 Mac Mini running OS X Tiger. To my surprise, this is considerably slower than the original IDE hard disk. Is this normal? I was under the impression that CF cards are faster than hard disks :-?

Title: Re: CF card *slower* than IDE HDD
Post by: Speelgoedmannetje on September 05, 2008, 02:44:43 PM

AFAIK Flash is indeed slower than a hdd.
Don't ask me how come...

Title: Re: CF card *slower* than IDE HDD
Post by: bloodline on September 05, 2008, 03:42:38 PM

Quote

motorollin wrote:
I have put a 16GB Transcend CF card in a CF->IDE adapter and am using it in a G4 Mac Mini running OS X Tiger. To my surprise, this is considerably slower than the original IDE hard disk. Is this normal? I was under the impression that CF cards are faster than hard disks :-?

CF cards are slow. SSD's run Flash chips in parallel (like Dual Memory controlers on RAM etc...) in order to up the speed.

Title: Re: CF card *slower* than IDE HDD
Post by: motorollin on September 08, 2008, 06:45:48 PM

Oops, forgot about this thread. So I assume the reason why CF cards are faster than hard disk drives on an Amiga is because neither is running at its top speed. In this situation, is it the reduced seek time of CF which gives it the edge?

Title: Re: CF card *slower* than IDE HDD
Post by: Rob on September 08, 2008, 09:31:02 PM

@motorollin

The transfer speeds of CF card seem to vary quite a lot.  The fastest I've seen are Lexar Professional UDMA 300x.  They can transfer opto 45MB/sec, but cost about £50 for 4GB.

Title: Re: CF card *slower* than IDE HDD
Post by: Zac67 on September 14, 2008, 12:28:57 PM

Many CF cards can do PIO mode 4 (at best) - on a fast machine that's pretty slow.