Most recent edit on 2007-11-23 21:31:56 by Wosh
Additions:
CategoryHardware
Edited on 2005-11-24 21:31:32 by KethD [KethdAdapters -- CF-IDE Adapter Report]
Additions:
KethdAdapters -- CF-IDE Adapter Report
Edited on 2005-11-21 07:48:43 by CrustyLobster
Additions:
Oldest known version of this page was edited on 2005-11-20 14:44:11 by KethD [CfIde - Compact Flash IDE Adapters]
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CfIde
CF-IDE Adapters
Compact Flash IDE Adapters
Compact Flash cards were invented (by
SanDisk/
SunDisk in the early 1990's) to have a mode that emulates IDE hard drives. All you need is a $5 adapter to be able to hook them up! (They can also be used in PCMCIA slots with a simple adapter, or in simple or fancy USB adapters. They should easily boot in IDE adapters, possibly boot in USB adapters in some circumstances, and are probably nearly impossible to boot in PCMCIA adapters. (Can
WakeUSB or anything do this?) In a perfect world, you would be able to set your CF card up one way, and then move it around and use it in many different ways, on many different computers. We are all working together to develop Puppy, trying to learn how to do such things.)
Each CF card has a speed rating, 12X, 40X etc. Depending on your circumstances, there may be other factors limiting the speed, so the speed rating may not matter in practice.
See also:
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=3829∞
Solid state adapter, Is there such a thing?
(To replace hard drive in a laptop computer?)
Yes, eBay is the best place to get Compact Flash CF-IDE adapters. There are a great variety -- 40 pin, 44 pin, male, female, single, dual, simple, fancy (LEDs and jumpers)... You can get them for about $5 each, but watch out for all the S/H confusion that plagues eBay. You will have to wait a couple weeks for them to ship from the far East in general to get the best prices. Also, the quality varies, so be a careful shopper, and inspect your new toy carefully. (Use a magnifying glass to examine the quality of the soldering -- the pin spacing on the connectors can be very crowded.) The cheapest adapters and CF cards are from Linnix (Google site:linnix.com), but they are of very limited use, because the CF connector is home-made, so it is very risky to insert a new card!
Most of the adapters have a floppy-drive type 4-pin power connector. Most computers only have one of these, powering the floppy drive. So usually you will also need a power adapter to go from the larger Molex-type 4-pin power. Strangely, the eBay sellers of adapters do not point this out or offer the needed power adapter.
An advantage of the 44-pin adapters is that the power is included with the data connector, no external power needed. (The 4-pin power cables provide +5 and +12, both needed by real hard drives, but CF cards only need +5.)
I recommend experimenting with 40-pin desktop IDE adapters before trying to convert your laptop. You will need to figure out some of the bleeding-edge tech issues: flash drives can function as hard drives, but there are subtle differences.
One difference is that the number of write cycles is limited. It is actually quite complex to understand this aspect of flash devices, because they have "wear leveling" features that store a sector of data in different places from time to time automagically to prevent spot wearout. Does this mean that when they quote a life of 100,000 write operations, they really mean "100,000 total write operations" instead of "each sector/block can be written 100,000 times" ?!? Can anyone point us to a good discussion of this?
In any event, I think there are ways to potentially tell Puppy/Linux that you want a file system mounted in such a way that it is used "conservatively" with regard to writes. You certainly don't want to use flash freely as swap space!
FlashDetail
The other complication is that CF cards only partially behave as hard drives. After struggling with this for days, testing on various computers (486-PI-II-III), I can only say, I don't understand it yet. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they do not. I think that some CF cards are more compatible than others, but some computers refuse to work with any of them. I have found no good discussion of this anywhere, and would be grateful for any pointers!
I haven't been able to find any good source of small cheap used CF cards for experimenting -- most everything seems to sell for $10-20 regardless of size/age. I guess it is good that CF is a technology that is lasting more than just a few years, and the older ones are still useful and holding their value!
See also:
FlashDetail
FlashPuppy
FlashPuppyDetails
-k 20nov05
