Century's SATA adapter supports 3 CF cards: cheap SSDs for all
By Thomas Ricker 
posted April 23rd 2008 4:24AM
posted April 23rd 2008 4:24AM
While we patiently wait 18 to 24 months for the CFast CompactFlash cards to arrive, there's always this: the DIY Century Compact Flash to SATA adapter. We've seen these adapters before of course, but this is the first we recall supporting 3x cards. That's a quickie 96GB SSD for about $450 (plus $192.57 for the adapter plus shipping) given current on-line prices. Not bad when you consider the $1,000+ price tag for a smaller 64GB SSD. Better yet, performance should be rock solid based on earlier reviews. In stock with RAID 0 / 5 support starting May 1st.
[Via Akihabara News]
[Via Akihabara News]
Pass that crack pipe you're smoking.
How come my EEE PC boots XP in 30 seconds then?
[quote=Howard]Even real SSDs have trouble keeping up with hard drive transfer speeds.[/quote]
Please post a link. That statement conflicts with all I've heard.
Because it has a fresh install of XP on it?
There are stats that SSDs are considerably slower at read/write for single large files... like 4GB ISO images etc
It's the read/write of small files which gives SSDs a speed boost... because of the tiny seek/access times relative to those of HDDs
I think anyway :)
When I can buy a 64GB SSD for £150 ($300) then I'll be all over this
The earlier test reflect results of a single CF setup ... this setup seems to promise RAID capabilities using 3 CF's ... so does anyone have the results of this setup in RAID?
Here's a link:
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=3287&p=5
Anandtech tested a MacBook Pro with a $4k 128GB SSD, and in many cases it was actually a little slower than a 7200 RPM laptop drive. The application loading times were about twice as fast, however, but it's probably not worth 4k just to have Final Cut open a few seconds faster. As far as reliability goes, for $4k you could take a second MacBook Pro along as a backup and you'd still be $2k ahead in price.
Here's a link to a review of pretty much the fastest SSD available: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3064
The SSDs from Mtron are pretty much the only ones that can outperform current hard drives. Other SSDs might be able to beat a Raptor at read speeds, but not write speeds. The fastest Compact Flash cards available have R/W speeds of about 40MB/s, which is at least twice as slow as top-of-the-line SSDs.
The fast access times might make it faster for some applications, but unless you're migrating from a 1.8" drive, you're going to take a hit running an OS off of a Compact Flash card.
The article is incorrect. This is not the first unit like this. Addonics has one already that handles 2, 3 or 4 CF cards and is either IDE\Sata or PCI slot connected. Check out www.addonics.com .
Not quite...they offer 4x->PCI, 2x->IDE, but only 1x->SATA...this is 3x->SATA, which is three times more than Addonics offers for SATA.
The Addonics one is $20 though. This thing costs 10 times that.
Laptop use aside, you've got to see the potential in a RAID configuration. The Addonics supports SATA port multipliers. So you can have five of them (at $20 each) stacked on to a single SATA port. Make it a RAID-0, and you've got five times the speed of a single CF card (and 5 times the capacity). So with 20MB/s CF cards, it would be as fast as a WD Raptor. But it would be low power, low heat, totally silent, and have 0ms access time.
Take it one step further. With four SATA ports, you could have TWENTY CF cards in a RAID configuration.
The price/GB/speed ratio isn't very good yet for CF. But it's getting very close.
IIRC you need to be careful to reconfigure systems to reduce the number of read write cycles when using SSD devices, else the drive life could be (relatively) limited does this card manage that?
Lots of people have instinctively made this argument. However, if you find a discussion that includes the numerics, it's clearly not a valid concern for most.
Not a big deal, as read-write cycles are pretty high, and I wouldn't expect any drive to control how the OS works. Just turn off virtual memory or use Linux without a swap file. There really hasn't been any need for it since the 90s for most people who don't run Photoshop or whatever.
Can anybody explain me the difference of the SSD and simple $30 CF-to-IDE/PATA converter? OK, I got the RAID part - but what else?
Speed.
Using a single, regular-speed CF card as an HDD replacement would be slooow.
The cool thing about this device is it supports faster CF cards, and 2 of them, so you can have them in a RAID setup... but as others have said, that will probably only just bring it to 2.5" HDD speed.
So still not as lightning as a full-blown SSD
Looks cool, but I'll wait till I can buy the adapter off of Geeks.com for 10 bucks...
You can get 1-card sata adapters for $10 on ebay...
32 gigs. And all pro cameras use it.
I did this with an IDE to CF adapter. the one I got supports 2 CF cards. Problem is com computers still see it as a removeable drive. Windows will not make software raid wiht removeable drives. had to use a driver hack. But you MUST have DMA CF cards or they run SLOWER then when in a USB card reader.
Link for me any other CF-SATA interace 2.5" bay formfactor with RAID 5. Yea, that's what I thought. RAID 5 IS the selling point. Those who don't know or don't care about the fault-tolerant advantages of RAID 5 would be better off getting your $10 converter anyhow.
There really is no comparison to anything else. 3-32GB CF cards set at raid 5 = 64GB. Total cost (including adapter): $500. If one fails you can replace it and still have your data intact.
The cheapest 64GB SSD is around $700.
Bottom line: Fault-tolerant SSD for 30% less.