Video: Century's Compact Flash SSD SATA adapter reviewed

Akihabara News managed to snap up Century's 3x Compact Flash adapter for review. As expected, the do-it-yourself SATA adapter aggregates a trio of CF cards and presents them as a single solid state disk to your computer in either RAID 0 (better capacity) or RAID 5 (better integrity) modes. The one caveat is this: the speed of the SSD is determined by the slowest CF in the mix. Regardless, this is without a doubt the most inexpensive way to create a quick and dirty SSD at about half the cost of an off-the-shelf, retail model. Check the action after the break.

[ugg.tryptophan @ May 22nd 2008 3:27AM]

oh...thats cool

[Ghen @ May 22nd 2008 7:46AM]

yeah, thats good stuff. Just goes to show how overpriced SSD drives are right now.

[duxxyuk @ May 22nd 2008 3:43AM]

agreed

[The Apple @ May 22nd 2008 3:47AM]

Nice...

Wanting one.

[jak0b @ May 22nd 2008 3:51AM]

I can't see/make out the benchmarks in the video! It would be better/easier to understand if you just had made a chart.

[The Apple @ May 22nd 2008 3:57AM]

Well now, That wouldn't look as cool now, would it

[doylemb @ May 22nd 2008 4:01AM]

Cool!

On a completely unrelated note, what's with the tinyness of that space bar?

[JLTate @ May 22nd 2008 4:52AM]

From the brief view I got of it (too lazy to watch it again), I think it was a Japanese keyboard layout.

[Bjarke Andersen @ May 22nd 2008 4:24AM]

Drooool

Now on a theoretical level imagine 3x 32GB 45MB/s CF cards in the adaptors RAID0 configuration.

That is 96GB storage with a theoretical transfer rate of 135MB/s. Now who said you could not put in more adaptors in your PC in yet another RAID0 SATA array.

So with e.g 3 more, then you have 288GB storage with transfer rate of 405MB/s

That would be some harddrive (if we look away from the swapfile matter)

[cybrstuff @ May 22nd 2008 4:37AM]

It would be very nice, but I don't think reality matches theory in this case. It looks like they were only pulling down ~10MB/s in RAID 0 and ~9MB/s in RAID 5. RAID these up all you want, but your commodity mechanical head-crashing platter jobber is going to cream this thing.

[w00t @ May 22nd 2008 4:42AM]

That'd be one expensive hard drive too!
At over £100 per Transcend 32GB CF card you're looking at well over £1000 once you've factored in the adaptors and RAID hardware.

And unless you spent a fair bit more than it's worth you'll max out the RAID controller at less than half the theoretical read speed of all 9 CF cards at their peak speeds.

Also the write speed would under half your read speed according to the benchmarks on those CF cards.

Suddenly those Mitron SSDs are looking a lot better value :)

[Brian @ May 22nd 2008 4:31AM]

Hi, i was just wondering what is the black box he plugged the SSD SATA adapter in to?

[Ken @ May 22nd 2008 4:45AM]

that looks to be a blackx desktop sata adapter... lets you connect sata 2.5 and 3.5 drives to your desktop via USB without having to first install it into an enclosure.

[Blaine Oliver @ May 22nd 2008 4:59AM]

They used E-SATA actually if you watched more carefully.

[Ken @ May 22nd 2008 4:34AM]

Price of $188 takes all the potential fun out of this adapter.. someone needs to make a knockoff that doesn't bother with the RAID5 portion.. might make it cheap enough to actually be worth getting.

[Howard @ May 23rd 2008 12:21AM]

If anyone else is trying to do one on the cheap with a single-card adapter, don't buy the one from monoprice.com. They have one for like $11, and I stupidly ordered it. It's a piece of shit and came with the SATA connector soldered on wrong. Go with the addonics adapter if you want a decent one-card solution.

[Howard @ May 23rd 2008 12:40AM]

I just found this on Addonics' site: http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad2sahdcf.asp It's supposedly a SATA adapter that has two CF slots with RAID support for $80, but it you can't add it to the shopping cart. So apparently they at least made a prototype, but they're not selling it yet.

[pete @ May 22nd 2008 4:34AM]

I'm really not sure I understand how this works.

How does taking a couple CF flash devices and buying an adapter cost half as much as a pre-made SSD drive?

Surely the people who make SSD drives could wise up to this, and just sell those adapted HDDs as SSDs, and the price would be halved.

Can someone explain this to me?

[Ed @ May 22nd 2008 6:29AM]

But they need money.

[ReggieXuk @ May 22nd 2008 5:22AM]

nice music

[Joachim Bengtsson @ May 22nd 2008 5:42AM]

Yeah, the second tune is awesome, what is it?

[anuj @ May 24th 2008 10:54PM]

fgfghngfgfgf

[BuddyBoy @ May 22nd 2008 5:47AM]

Wow 3 compact flash cards at 1GB each!

I know you can get larger sizes I always think its funny to see demos done with the bits around the office.

[Ben @ May 22nd 2008 3:34PM]

Thats what she said...

[Mark @ May 22nd 2008 5:47AM]

Given the low cost of high speed CF cards, the high cost of SSDs confuses me. You'd think there would be some cross parallels between the technologies.

[poulan @ May 22nd 2008 7:31AM]

Consider R&D costs + low supply and high demand.

[Jazper @ May 22nd 2008 6:45AM]

Love the idea, but...

1) CFs have effective write limits (10,000 or 100,000 per cell). For using in a camera, that's a number you won't have to worry about. On a frequently used disk? Um, no thanks.

2) Speed at 10M/s is ok, but certainly not blinding. Faster/bigger CFs are available but then the price advantage starts getting lower quickly.

3) The media manufacturers will decide we need a new format (soon, I'm sure) and stop making CFs. Since you're tied to two techs here (adapter interface and CF) you're at more risk for obsolescence.

4) What's with having to hold the button on boot to get Raid 5?? That can't be right....

[Anthony @ May 22nd 2008 9:37AM]

RE: 4)

I'm guessing that's a one time "initialization" of the RAID-5 volume (hold it down to initialize the disks and build the volume, only have to do it once for a set of disks).

[Skry @ May 23rd 2008 10:46AM]

Sounds interesting, but when the adapter costs £100 and getting 3 high quality 4GB compact flash cards would cost almost £150, that's £250 on a hard drive that wouldn't stand up in speed to a conventional Hard drive that costs £70 or less and only give you 12GB of storage at the most

[digitallysick @ May 22nd 2008 9:08AM]

why is the speed only 10mb per sec??

[Jazper @ May 22nd 2008 9:41AM]

One more thing:

Anyone that wants to make a video about something tech? This is a GREAT example to copy from.

Tripod mount for the cam (== steady)
Clearly thought out ahead of time instead of ad-lib.
VERY clear what's going on.
No language issues (well, not many - it's still English on the PC)
Actually in focus! :)

[Spyder @ May 22nd 2008 4:42PM]

They need to outline the graphic text if they are going to have it white or change the color of the text to something that is not white.

[franzbonus @ May 22nd 2008 9:45AM]

Does anyone know the soundtracks played in the video?

[jthomas @ May 22nd 2008 10:11AM]

SSDs are much faster and I'd think thier technology would be better where they write to different areas of the chips rather than writing over the same area. This extends the life of the memory chips. That DIY CF kit costs $188. Then cost of cards, and snow. This is pointless.

I get great speeds using a SDHC usb memory reader and a 16 GB SDHC card I use for my DSLR. I think I was getting 16-20 mbps read speed last time i checked.

[shawne @ May 22nd 2008 1:23PM]

The Speed issus is because he had on 40x card in the mix, that limits the speed of the SSD to thw speed of a 40x CF card. If he would have used 3 x266 card you would have seen something like 40Mbs speeds. They make faster CF cards too. What i don't get is the cost of the thing. $188 bucks. give me a break. I wonder how this stuff compairs

http://www.addonics.com/products/cf_adapter/

[Alan @ May 22nd 2008 1:20PM]

The commercial SSDs are more expensive because they have onboard ECC and wear-leveling. I'd be surprised if you got more than a few months of use out of this on a windows box.

Also, is this RAID chip onboard, or is it software? I'm guessing because of the inexpensive price that it's software. And I'm sorry, but 9MB/s is only half as fast as the cheapest laptop HDD. Most USB flash drives support writes of 30MB/s these days anyways.

[David @ May 22nd 2008 1:23PM]

Err, all of you that are commenting on the slowness and suckage of SSD adapter are forgetting one thing. He said that it is limited to the slowest SSD. He then proceeded to use 2 80X CFs and 1 *40x* !!! CF.
I think it's a great result for using 3 40x "effective" CFs together.

Like dude, why didn't you use a 266x or 300x CF. Geeze, even a 233x A-data would have been fine and their only like 24 bucks. Heck, Transcend has 266X for 40 clams.

[Joshua Walters @ May 22nd 2008 4:01PM]

This is what makes me wonder why a 32gb SSD costs an arm and a leg, and why a 64gb SSD costs you your first born child.

[Nihility @ Jun 6th 2008 4:28PM]

because they have 10 times the performance of that pathetic 10MB/s in the video?

[Greg Baz @ May 22nd 2008 4:25PM]

You have to use UDMA CF cards to get any preformance out of this like the transcend x133. Otherwise the cards preformance will be below their expected performance. I did this about a year ago using CF to IDE adapter that took 2 cards each. I had to use a hacked driver for the adapter card so that windows would see it as a fixed disk (this unit seems to solve that problem). with the standard board and default windows driver it saw it as a removable and would not allow for software raid (dynamic). Using non UDMA cards in ths adapter they max out at 2.7x when i was useing sandisk extreame II cards.
Here is a page with my test results.
ftp://njcbf.com/spanned.htm
the limited speed is a result of non DMA cards
here is a forum discussion I was involved in http://www.ocforums.com/archive/index.php/t-505505.html

[jfjb @ May 22nd 2008 5:52PM]

anyone noticed the VLC icons everywhere?
thanks NOT to M$ media player

[mhedhli @ May 23rd 2008 12:01PM]

Why use 80x cards... I imagine the speeds would be greatly improved with 300x cards.

[Ray @ May 26th 2008 12:28PM]

Found the song..

https://www.goodnessmusic.com/

its from Coppe'
title Lavender oil remix


also, can you raid two of these card readers together so effectively its 6 card raid 0?

[Dick Martin @ Jun 19th 2008 7:16PM]

Can someone post a link to the eSATA desktop adapter used in the video, please? Thanks.

[buffalojump @ Jun 25th 2008 6:06AM]

Hey Dick Martin, use the link of www.Akihabaranews.com there, you will find what you are looking 4. All the best in your search.