Where to buy a compact flash adapter?

[alenppc]

Does anyone know where to buy a CF adapter?

I looked in all of the internet stores that I know of, even mycableshop.ca which carries rare items, but I can't find a CF adapter anywhere.

There appear to be loads on ebay, but they are all located in Hong Kong, and I don't really want to buy one from there, with all the hassle and import duties I would have to go through it probably wouldn't be worth it.

Any ideas?

[maffoo]

What sort of compact flash adapter? Do you mean CF->PCMCIA or CF->IDE?

You can get the PCMCIA adapters from Amigakit. If it's the IDE adapter you need, I bought one from a seller called MobileSupply recently. They're based in Hong Kong, but the delivery was very fast and the price was low enough that there were no import duties.

Hope that helps  :-)

Matt

[alenppc]

maffoo wrote:
What sort of compact flash adapter? Do you mean CF->PCMCIA or CF->IDE?

I meant CF->IDE adapters.

MobileSupply recently. They're based in Hong Kong, but the delivery was very fast and the price was low enough that there were no import duties.

Thanks for your input, Matt. I will consider buying from them.

Also what is an average life cycle of a CF card when used as a hard drive?

I suppose it must be really low if you use it with Windows, as windows is constantly (and pointlessly) writing/swapping to the hard drive, but with Amiga I would expect it to be at least a few years.

[LoadWB]

Check out Mach5 Products http://mach5products.com/

I bought a 40-pin adapter with a hard drive profile, 40-pin sit-on-IDE adapter, and a 44-pin adapter.  I used the first unit in my A4000 and the last one in my A1200

http://alan2.rateliff.us/a1200flash/
http://alan2.rateliff.us/a4000flash/

[quenthal]

alenppc wrote:

Also what is an average life cycle of a CF card when used as a hard drive?

I suppose it must be really low if you use it with Windows, as windows is constantly (and pointlessly) writing/swapping to the hard drive, but with Amiga I would expect it to be at least a few years.

I've had mine for about 1 year now. Infact, I'm using my 2GB CompactFlash in CF->IDE-adapter which is connected to IDE->UWSCSI-adapter (using CSPPC's UWSCSI). The small risc-chip in that idescsi-adapter takes away all that time my poor miggy would have to spend while working on that awful&slow PIO-mode-using A4k's IDE-connector. This way I get as much as possible out of this (bandwidth & seektimes).

You're correct, the lifetime may not be very long, but with backups it is not so bad - cards get always cheaper, faster and bigger.

However, I have hints for those using flash-cards as harddrives in their Amigas:

1) use your ram disk as much as possible, for extracting packages, testing some new stuff etc.
2) Remember to use RAM drive as your browser's cache and as temp-drawer for all your software. (for example, I have Aweb's Temp Path as T:, which is in Ram Drive and Cache path as RAM:awb/)
3) Use env-handler or atleast make sure your ENV is in ram
4) USE SOFTLINKS - this takes a lot of useless writing to your flash card away. For example in OS3.9 fontcache (the file for speeding up font selection in SYS:Fonts) is created /gets written over many times during workbench usage, Genesis writes it's log and resolve.conf atleast every bootup etc. For files like this use softlinks and point them to ENV or ram:

makelink AMITCP:log/GENESiS.log ENV:GENESiS.log SOFT
makelink AMITCP:db/resolv.conf ENV:resolv.conf SOFT
makelink SYS:Fonts/fontcache ENV:fontcache SOFT

From time to time I check if there is something I have not deleted/modified by myself in my .recycled -drawer (I'm using SFS) and trace the reason.

Hope this helps!