has anyone used cf to sata converter??

[beingblueeyes]

I’m just about to start a build on my 2ed htpc using a
ip35-e motherboard
e6300 cpu
2 gb ram
I forget the kind of gpu I have coming:-/ and I’m using (2) 500 gb mybooks that I have my movies backup on. Alls I need is a internal hard drive big enough for xp pro and around 2 gb of other programs, when looking for a hd i came across thishttp://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.11164
it lets you plug a cf card into a sata port to make a cheap ssd. has anyone used this or something like it? cf cards are pretty cheap and about the right size for what I need, would this be faster than a generic sata drive?

[Diddyu]

That's entirely doable, however, the speed of the drive depends on the card you use. It could be faster than a HDD, but it may be slower.

[meionm]

It will be slower than regular hard drive and probably cost more. You probably looked at cheap compact flash cards which will be slow. It might be good enough for not demanding system.

CF card has speed rating 266x, X = Multiply by 150kb, 266*150kb/s= around 40mb/s if possible. Generic HD will do over 50mb/s.

Might want to check link below.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AData/16GB_Turbo_Compact_Flash

[Madwand]

The cheap ones will probably be pretty slow. They're getting faster, but if you want something really fast, you have to look carefully and spend more -- for DMA support in particular, both at the adapter level and at the CF level.

The articles about the A-Data "Turbo" series vs. the "Speedy" series show this, although in their case, the "fast" card wasn't as fast as these cards can go, and the "slow" ones aren't as bad as they used to be. They seem to be getting faster, but you just can't tell until you measure.

I've attached my comparison, also done with A-Data Turbo vs. Speedy, in a DMA-capable CF to IDE adapter.

Subjectively, I found the DMA-capable card to be pretty zippy, and the non-DMA one to be pretty slow. I also had issues with these cards until I turned off write caching.

[beingblueeyes]

thanks for getting back to me guys, that’s a pretty good read and your graphs madwand add to the tail being told maybe this isn’t what I’m looking for after all