CF as a hard drive

[Bozo]

I purchased a Startech CF to PATA adaptor. It is supposed to let you use a CF chip as a hard drive. Supposed to be plug-n-play.
I cannot get it to be recognized at all. No hard drive utility can see it. The BIOS does not see it. Do I need to do something to the CF card first.

Thanks,

Bozo :joker:

Duh, wrong forum

 

[Tannin]

You been hanging out with DD?

 

[Stereodude]

What does Windows show it as?

 

[Bozo]

What does Windows show it as?

Nothing. It doesn't recognize it at all.

Bozo :joker:

 

[udaman]

You been hanging out with DD?

Mass subliminal voting hysteria, all the election advertising is getting to some of the finest minds here in the USA Tannin

Was supposed to go into the dSLR thread with all the other CF card as HD questions .

As DD would tell you, Obama's advertising director of operations would say "this is how we roll" (hip slang)

 

[ddrueding]

Some CF cards and adapters don't support DMA, so make sure it is off. Also, some have a jumper to choose master/slave/CS and a jumper to source power (either IDE pin 40 for VIA EPIA systems or external for everybody else).

 

[sechs]

Ans since we're in the wrong forum anyway, I have a stack of small CF cards. What are the thoughts on a RAID?

 

[ddrueding]

Sweet

I don't have a PATA RAID card or I would try it right now.

 

[Gilbo]

Dan of Dan's Data has some info on the topic. His verdict "Dumb then, smart now..." I was looking into this a while ago, but I got lazy and forgot about it.

I certainly think it could inexpensively produce some seriously fast storage.

 

[ddrueding]

Here is an SATA to CF adapter that I am looking at. I still have 6 free ports on my RAID card...24GB and decent speed....hmmm

 

[ddrueding]

Another interesting idea.

 

[Chewy509]

While I can see CF + Adapters as a quiet and low power storage solution which is great for laptops or HTPC (OS Drive), I can't see the merit in it for genreal purpose desktop systems...

4x Kingston 8GB 266x CF Card (45MB/s Read) ($170 ea + adapters) = $680 for 32GB of storage for a potential 160MB/s read.

or

4x WDC Raptor 74GB (avg ~75MB/s Read) ($149ea) = $600 for 300GB of a storage for a potential 300MB/s read.

So double the potential performance for less cost and over 4x times the storage. (at the cost of heat and electrical power).

Rather go a SAS setup...

PS. That 4x CF adapter in a PCI card w/RAID (even though it's a Sil based solution) does look interesting.

 

[blakerwry]

Bozo, btw, I'm using one of these startech CF adapters just fine with a PII class monowall firewall setup. Worked great, but I believe I did need to set some of the jumpers... don't know if I had to adjust the BIOS settings or not.

 

[Bozo]

For some reason it started to work. I beleive I had the voltage setting wrong. It took hours to load XP.
Still fooling around with it.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Stereodude]

For some reason it started to work. I beleive I had the voltage setting wrong. It took hours to load XP.
Still fooling around with it.

Bozo :joker:

What CF card are you using? They should be pretty quick.

 

[Bozo]

It is a Kingston of some flavor, 2GB. I don't have it in front of me at the moment.

Bozo :joker:

 

[sechs]

Another interesting idea.

$50 for a 256MB CF RAID 0.

What would I do with it?

 

[ddrueding]

256MB? Not much. If it were at least a gig or two I would put photoshop scratch disks on it.

 

[sechs]

That would involve spending real money. I mean, except for that controller.