IDE Compact Flash on A4000 initial review

[Matt_H]

'sandisk' ... is also one of the slowest CF-cards available

Darn! That's what I bought!  :-(

[Ohno]

Darn! That's what I bought!

As I said.. most sold
I have two Sandisk CF-cards (64MB for digital camera and 256 MB for PDA). But a friend warned me about the speed-issues last week. He noticed that with a very cheap card he was trying his digital camera seemed much faster in storing the images. So he did a web-search and found out the cause... Sandisk is dead-slow, unless you buy their very expensive high-speed versions.

I'm sure gonna check speeds before buying another CF-card in the future


Regards,

Onno

I'm gonna buy one of these next week to put in my new A1200.

Scan in the UK do a 256Mb ScanFlash Compact Flash Media (x10 Speed) for £31+VAT.  This seems quite cheap, and it's bigger and a LOT faster than the 2.5" IDE drive in it at the moment.

No brand name is mentioned on the site, can anyone tell me if it's any good?  Does 10x mean it's fast?

[Ohno]

Does 10x mean it's fast?

If you look at the link I put here earlier you can see speedtest-results. In that first table at the end of each lines the speeds are displayed. It seems 10x for writing would be about average, for reading even the Sandisk is faster  :-(

Ohno wrote:

Does 10x mean it's fast?

If you look at the link I put here earlier you can see speedtest-results. In that first table at the end of each lines the speeds are displayed. It seems 10x for writing would be about average, for reading even the Sandisk is faster  :-(

hmmmmmmm.....  I'll have to shop about.

Ten speed is still faster than a 2.5" IDE drive running off Gayle though, no?

-edit-

What is the easiest way to add a 40-pin ATA controller to an A1200?  Then I can buy a 40pin cfide-adaptor instead of the 44pin one, and use it in other computers besides the A1200 in future.

[Terminills]

how about http://www.mesanet.com/cfadptds.pdf
has both 44 and a 40 pin connector.

[Floid]

As a general heads-up, I gather there are two sorts of these adapters.

"Dumb" ones are straight-through, perhaps with some power control components on board (maybe still some sort of buffering on the IDE lines?).  There's a TAPR?-originated design common and cheap on eBay that's like this... in any case, they 'appear' as a generic ATA drive via the controller on the CF card itself (good), but you *don't* want to pretend you can hotplug, even if the drive is unmounted in software- bad enough to blow out the IDE controller on a generic x86 board, let alone an Amiga (bad!).  Power down before swapping the card in and out!

Less common on eBay, but presumably of equal standing everywhere else, are 'smart' adapters, which include a bridging chipset to drive the CF card in what some have called a 'native mode.'  As far as I can tell, this just means there's some sort of logic involved to ensure hotplug can occur safely (CF still basically == ATA, as far as I know), but as a side effect, the 'smart' chipset appears to the host as some sort of removable ATAPI(?) device, and thus this breed of adapter doesn't stand a chance of working with OSes that don't recognize and support the device class.  Apparently FreeBSD didn't support these three years ago - the best reference I could find; for all I know, Linux might, but probably didn't for a long time, so if you find an adapter being marketed to Linux/*NIX users, it's probably of the simpler sort mentioned above.

[color=FF3300]Edit:[/color] Looks like I was a little wrong about the 'modes' -  this post provides a hint as to the spec... and might open the door to 'smart' bridges being of even weirder Windows-centric design, perhaps.

Over in USB land, all adapters seem like they should support hotplug as a feature of the bridging chipsets used; to be safe, you can just pull the adapter off the USB chain before changing CFs.

---

In short: It's a good idea not to hotplug unless you're absolutely certain it's safe (remember, eBay claims and/or the labeling of brandless stuff from overseas doesn't count as 'absolutely certain!'), and it's probably good to be aware that there's a breed of adapters that may not work.  (For all I know, there might be a third breed of bridge that manages hotplug safely but *also* presents a 'straight-through' connection to the host controller; caveat emptor.)

[Bandaren]

What about  the problem with 3.3v and 5v CF cards ?

[Terminills]

What about the problem with 3.3v and 5v CF cards ?

some of the adapters seem to be able to handle both types.

[Dr_Righteous]

Yes, I feel it necessary to clarify that my adapter is a "dumb" adapter... With big bold print on the board "NO HOT SWAP!" In fact, the only components on the board at all are two resistors and a master/slave jumper.

A good source for CF cards is http://www.18004memory.com They offer CF cards in both 12x and 30x configurations.

Like I said, at 4x I think I've hit the maximum transfer rate of the on-board IDE connection. Thus a faster CF card likely won't make much difference, unless you're using a bootable FastATA upgrade card.

1.5MB/s transfer is still pretty serious for a plain NON-ATA IDE interface made in the early 90's!  :-D

Oh, and a hearty "You're welcome" to the thank-you's  :-)

Dr_Righteous wrote:
Yes, I feel it necessary to clarify that my adapter is a "dumb" adapter... With big bold print on the board "NO HOT SWAP!" In fact, the only components on the board at all are two resistors and a master/slave jumper.

A good source for CF cards is http://www.18004memory.com They offer CF cards in both 12x and 30x configurations.

Like I said, at 4x I think I've hit the maximum transfer rate of the on-board IDE connection. Thus a faster CF card likely won't make much difference, unless you're using a bootable FastATA upgrade card.

1.5MB/s transfer is still pretty serious for a plain NON-ATA IDE interface made in the early 90's!  :-D

Oh, and a hearty "You're welcome" to the thank-you's  :-)

Right.  I'm convinced.  Friday afternoon, i'll be buying one of these babies, and a 256MB compact flash card.

I imagine the Amiga will boot up in a second or three max, as there is no other harddrives to initialise in it.

[leirbag28]

No Man!! on't buy that IDE to CF adaptor for your 1200! that would be a waste of an IDE port.....instead just get a PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor and use the 1200's PCMCIA port.....also you will need to download  cfd.lha and fat95.lha from Aminet. you will soon be surprised as now you will be able to use CF cards, Sony memory stick, SD cards, IBM micro drives and others, and you can even boot off them if you make an assign with a floppy I belive. But i have been using this for months. its excellent for tranfering pictures from your Digital camera. It's jsut a matter of plugging it in to the 1200 and thats it!

Amiga freakin rules!  BIGTIME!

leirbag28 wrote:
No Man!! on't buy that IDE to CF adaptor for your 1200! that would be a waste of an IDE port.....instead just get a PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor and use the 1200's PCMCIA port.....also you will need to download  cfd.lha and fat95.lha from Aminet. you will soon be surprised as now you will be able to use CF cards, Sony memory stick, SD cards, IBM micro drives and others, and you can even boot off them if you make an assign with a floppy I belive. But i have been using this for months. its excellent for tranfering pictures from your Digital camera. It's jsut a matter of plugging it in to the 1200 and thats it!

Amiga freakin rules!  BIGTIME!

How much do the PCMCIA cards cost?

The cfide adaptors are only 20 pounds and i can boot straight off it, and later on use it in other computers when the 1200 dies.

[Dr_Righteous]

leirbag28 wrote:
No Man!! on't buy that IDE to CF adaptor for your 1200! that would be a waste of an IDE port.....instead just get a PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor and use the 1200's PCMCIA port.....also you will need to download  cfd.lha and fat95.lha from Aminet. you will soon be surprised as now you will be able to use CF cards, Sony memory stick, SD cards, IBM micro drives and others, and you can even boot off them if you make an assign with a floppy I belive. But i have been using this for months. its excellent for tranfering pictures from your Digital camera. It's jsut a matter of plugging it in to the 1200 and thats it!

Amiga freakin rules!  BIGTIME!

I think you missed the point... You can't boot from the PCMCIA converter.... The idea is to speed up the system, not just plug in memory cards.

[MarkTime]

Repeat after me, CF cards ARE NOT FASTER.

The current CF standard tops out at 4mb/s,
thats faster than your observed 1.5mb/s....

but of course, as you mentioned, the Amiga is the bottleneck, not the CF card.  And the same thing will be true, if you plug in a modern IDE drive....you'll find the same bottleneck.

But whereas CF cards top out at 4mb/s...and the upcoming CF 2.0 standard will go up to 16mb/s....hard drives were at 16mb/s during the Fast ATA era...and went to 33mb/s, and then 66mb/s and 100 and finally now at 133mb/s....well, that's the speed of the standard, real world is not so fast, but it's way more than 4mb/s...!!!!  

I just bought a 30mb maxtor 7200rpm, 2mb cache drive for $30 after rebates from comp-usa.

Not only is it much much larger, has no problems with writes (your card will burn out quickly if you use it for writes a lot)...but my drive is much much faster.

I'm trying to give good advice, please....just look up the published transfer rates...a 1x = 150k/s....so use the speed readings and determine the speed of your CF card....you'll see its much slower.

my brother runs a large business and uses CF drives for boot drives...he does it because of no moving parts, and he thinks it might be more reliable, plus its very small and low power.

(he runs a large isp)....ok....he said all along that CF drives are not faster...I made the same mistake a few years back, thinking they must be faster.
Now....since then I read the spec's and keep tabs on them, but they are still not very fast compared to hdd's, even today.
.

[Terminills]

@Marktime

they might not be faster however ... they don't need a boot delay ... nor do they make a sound so in the end it's all a matter of choice.  AFAIK it's hit or miss with the new hd's and the A4000 or 1200 ide on whether or not it'll take 3 reboots to start.