CF card as Solid State Drive

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antiloquax · #1 Post by **antiloquax** » Sun 05 Feb 2012, 18:13

The laptop which I use for all my home computing is rather old, but I am quite attached to it (never mind the fact I haven't got the funds for a new one).
It only has an 18gb HD, but that is more than enough since I mainly use memory sticks for storage.
Anyway, I was sort of wondering about buying a solid state drive. Do you think it would be possible to replace the original drive with a SSHD. If I did this, I know I'd see benefits in boot-up and disk access times.
mark

#2 Post by **Flash** » Sun 05 Feb 2012, 18:18

I'd do it if I were you. A solid state drive uses less power and is far more reliable than is a hard disk drive. If if survives the first week of constant use, it should last a lifetime.

antiloquax · #3 Post by **antiloquax** » Sun 05 Feb 2012, 18:25

I'm thinking I should try it! It should really speed up my dear old Tecra! (if it works!).

Pence · #4 Post by **Pence** » Sun 05 Feb 2012, 21:28

Older laptops use a Parallel ATA (PATA) interface, which isn't compatible with most solid state drives.

starhawk · #5 Post by **starhawk** » Sun 05 Feb 2012, 21:29

SSD's were only briefly in the "IDE" (@Pence: same as PATA) form of connector/protocol that you will need, and word is on my other forum (a computer enthusiast place) that those are slower than cr*p. ALL modern SSDs (the early ones are no longer "modern") are SATA, which is a completely different protocol and connector setup. Yes, you can convert, but you will get plenty of data corruption on your way -- the adapters don't work very well yet.

For you I would recommend going on eBay and purchasing an IDE->CF (compactflash) media card adapter, and then going to a different place (offhand I suggest Newegg[dot]com, they rock) and getting a fast and roomy CF card. Mind you, the faster the better, AND you *cannot* use a swap partition on the card! (Flash memory, which is used by media cards as well as by USB sticks, has a limit on the number of read/write cycles one can perform with it.)

Right now, I've a 4gb CF I could give you for about $10 shipped if you're in the US, but it's really really slow (80x or 133x, I forget). You want something like 400x+ and 32gb -- not cheap, but it WILL work.

jpeps · #6 Post by **jpeps** » Mon 06 Feb 2012, 00:13

starhawk wrote: You want something like 400x+ and 32gb -- not cheap, but it WILL work.

Transcend 32GB SSD, 2.5- Inch, IDE, MLC seems to work well with linux. $82 on Amazon.

starhawk · #7 Post by **starhawk** » Mon 06 Feb 2012, 03:46

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820208529

Transcend 32gb CF card, 400x (plenty fast!). Plays well with everything

...and this adapter --> http://r.ebay.com/hJ0cMF

Assembly is as easy as 1,2,3:

(1) put CF card in adapter (the white connector).
(2) put adapter+card in your laptop's HDD caddy (the thing that holds the hard drive itself).
(3) put the whole deal back in the laptop and boot it up.

I've done this many times. Transcend is a really good company, and those little adapters are (essentially) passive, so there's almost nothing to break. There are really only two potential issues:
(1) make sure that the adapter is set to 3.3v supply (how to do this will be really obvious when you get the adapter)
(2) your laptop may have a little fiddly-bit that changes the connector on the end. Just yank it off the HDD and put it on the CF->IDE adapter.

If you're confused, I'll gladly post or PM you (your choice) some helpful pictures.

antiloquax · #8 Post by **antiloquax** » Mon 06 Feb 2012, 06:18

Thanks for your replies. I opened up my laptop to have a look at the hard-drive arrangement, and the HD adapter board / CF card idea looks like it'll work.
I'm just a bit concerned that i won't be able to have a swap partition. I need to do a bit more research.

jpeps · #9 Post by **jpeps** » Mon 06 Feb 2012, 06:25

antiloquax wrote: I'm just a bit concerned that i won't be able to have a swap partition. I need to do a bit more research.

A swapfile should work.
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=58615

#10 Post by **Flash** » Mon 06 Feb 2012, 15:04

With 512 MB of RAM it is unlikely that swap memory would ever be used, so go ahead and make a 512 MB swap partition on your CF card. I have asked many times for anyone to report "wearing out" their flash memory by using it as swap memory. As far as I know, no one has.

Moose On The Loose · Mon 06 Feb 2012, 15:21

Flash wrote:With 512 MB of RAM it is unlikely that swap memory would ever be used, so go ahead and make a 512 MB swap partition on your CF card. I have asked many times for anyone to report "wearing out" their flash memory by using it as swap memory. As far as I know, no one has.

It depends a lot on what you do whether a swap gets used. The computer I am typing this on has 2G of memory and uses the swap sometimes. I use some scientific programs with a huge memory footprint.

Even gimp can get big if the picture you are working on has a lot of layers and a lot of pixels.

The swap can get used but because linux does a very good job of avoiding doing swap I/O, the rate for the writes (what causes the wear) is going to be very low. Generally, stuff will get copied out to swap once and read back several times.

linuxbear · #12 Post by **linuxbear** » Mon 06 Feb 2012, 20:42

CF is also a good idea and the cards are seen by the machine as PATA. No conversion is needed, therefore they are faster than an SD card. You might to go online and get the dimensions of your current hard drive. Some of the CF adapters have two CF card slots as opposed to one. You could use a smaller CF in the second slot as a swap file.
I decided to use a 16GB CF card in a PCMCIA slot rather than upgrade my hard drive. It was much cheaper than buying a new drive. This turned out to be a nice place to store docs and media files and I found out that the CF card is plenty fast enough to watch movies from.

antiloquax · #13 Post by **antiloquax** » Tue 07 Feb 2012, 08:32

Thanks for your replies. I'm not sure if my swapfile gets used. Probably not - I don't run anything that needs huge memory on this machine. I am definitely going to give it a try.
mark

PaulBx1 · #14 Post by **PaulBx1** » Tue 07 Feb 2012, 21:40

I don't use swap at all. I have 1GB of ram. Buy more ram if you are worried.

Format your ssd drive ext2 to avoid the journaling writes.

I'd be nervous about CF. They are pretty slow I think, compared to regular hard drives or SSD drives.

starhawk · #15 Post by **starhawk** » Wed 08 Feb 2012, 00:55

ext2 can corrupt more easily than ext3; I'd say the savings isn't worth it.

CF *can* be slow, but there are many speeds of CF. 80x or 133x is sluggish in comparison to a spinning-disk drive. 400x or so is a lot better than that, though.

Keep in mind that the "###x" speeds are exactly the same as those for an optical drive. 1x = 150KBps transfer... ###x = (###*150)KBps transfer. The higher the number, the faster the card. Mind you that ATA-100, the most common of the IDE/PATA speeds available IIRC, is 100MBps.

Note the capitalization there -- b = bits, B = Bytes. It's important! (But I'm a bit of a hypocrite there myself so feel free to Byte me when I screw up.)

#16 Post by **Flash** » Wed 08 Feb 2012, 02:17

Also the "speed" of a drive depends on whether you are reading contiguous files. If a large file is very fragmented (fairly unlikely) or the OS is just reading lots of files that are scattered all over the disk, a hard disk will be slow compared to any flash drive. Writing I'm not so sure about. Possibly a hard disk will write a continuous (unfragmented) file as fast as any solid state drive, I don't know.

linuxbear · #17 Post by **linuxbear** » Wed 08 Feb 2012, 20:37

http://www.amazon.com/Duracell-Speed-Co ... 849&sr=1-2

...couldn't flag this as a pretty link, you might have to cut and paste

linuxbear · #18 Post by **linuxbear** » Wed 08 Feb 2012, 20:39

This is the one I found is a 16Gb for about $43. This is touted as a "600X" card and is fairly responsive. It should be noted that a lot of professional photogs are still using CF cards and that is probably because the speed on these cards is continuously increasing.
The other advantage is that a CF card is seen by the system as an IDE hard drive. For this reason, it should be a good boot device for older machines. My aspire 3K lappy will not boot from USB at all.

...Glen

PaulBx1 · #19 Post by **PaulBx1** » Fri 10 Feb 2012, 17:13

I got the fastest possible sdhc card I could find, plugging it into the card reader of my netbook, and it was still much slower than the ssd internal drive, which in itself is no great shakes in a Dell Mini 9. But the speed difference may have more to do with the bus than anything, I suppose.

ext2 can corrupt more easily than ext3; I'd say the savings isn't worth it.

Well, that's what backups are for. Anyway I've been running ext2 exclusively for years and not had any problem with it. Whenever I lose power and the machine dies I do have to fsck though.

ext2 is higher performance and easier on your flash drives, and leaves you more available space. If you prefer a sports car over a minivan, ext2 is for you.

linuxbear · #20 Post by **linuxbear** » Fri 10 Feb 2012, 20:26

If you are using a plug-in SD card, the interface is most likely USB2. Max speed there is going to be a lot slower than anything connected to a SATA or an IDE I/O port

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CF card as Solid State Drive

CF card as Solid State Drive