Hello,
Quote:
Originally Posted by lvlamb
Sata transfers at a rate of 3 Gbits, best flash assemblies go 15 Mbytes to 40 Mbytes (at high cost). This is 10-15 times slower.
I just use USB flash sticks rated 9 Mbytes, but 25 bucks (some months ago) for 4 Gigs.
And I can carry my usual OS and apps on any piece of hardware that can boot from USB.
Was planning to use small IDE 40/44pins flash to hold the root but as flash sticks start to be used in marketing, prices drop even more.
Got a half Tera with both eSATA and USB 2 for archival and backups.
All other machines have a directory I can use with NFS, as working space when needed and until the drive dies.
Caution: the market for SC is mainly digital photography and the CFs are FAT32 formatted. Speed increase is not always wired but can come, even partly, from embedded software. Newfs the CF (if that CF accepts it) you probably would fall back to 5-9 Mbytes/sec.
Check with the manufacturer's sites, not resellers.
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Companies that sell adapters (i.e., Addonics) sell several versions as a dual CF adapter - that 2 cards can be placed in RAID increasing performance. While they can't currently compete with SATA, they may be able to give IDE some competition. But, I'll still go for the SATA adapter, since an SATA cable is not as cumbersome to deal with as an IDE cable (aesthetics and cable management more than potential performance increase).
CF to SATA/IDE is best for seek time performance. There is no way a traditional hard drive can rival it for random seek time, since the CF doesn't have to rotate or move a head. But, the big drawback comes in sustained read/write of large files - which is the result of the lower I/O throughput. But, many of us don't regularly transfer 1GB files back and forth. Most of are disk writing is with frequent and relatively small (<10MB) files. And I think that CF will shine in this pursuit.
And don't forget that traditional hard disks are leveling off their tremendous improvements in speed and size, but the door is open for CF (and SSD) to make drastic improvements, especially as interest in them gains, and the future will potentially be very bright for them. It should also be noted that the largest market for CF is currently in the embedded and mini-itx markets.