SSD vs CF Adapter

I been looking at some SSDs of late. I figure I can get a 32GB for about $200. I saw some 2.5" CF adapters on eBay, which it looks like I can get a 32GB CF card and an adapter for around $100. I don't know much about them and thought maybe someone here might have some insight. My main question would be how's the performance of a CF adapter as compared to a SSD or even a conventional hard drive? Anything else I should concerned about if I decide to go this route? Thanks for any help.

 

A CF card will be very slow.

 

That's not necessarily true. Many CF cards, especially those rated at slower speeds, will probably be slow enough so as to render them useless as a boot drive. Nonetheless, there are high-speed CF cards that, while ultimately boasting quoted speeds substantially slower than even your run-of-the-mill OCZ Core, will run Windows just fine.

I'm typing this post on a machine that has a 4GB CF card as its main drive. It's made by Transcend and rated at 300X. It's certainly slower than the Samsung in my E6400, but it also feels faster than the 5400RPM HDD that I used to have in here. It's also silent and draws less power. There have been concerns over data corruption on CF SSD solutions, but I've been using this setup for several hours a day for three to four months now and I haven't encountered any glitches.

Nonetheless, I would probably recommend a real SSD over a CF solution in most cases. In your case, you'll be paying double for a good Samsung or Mtron 32GB SSD , but you will get more than double the speed even in random reads and writes, and the true SSD will probably be more reliable.

4GB 300X CF Solution:

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 43.222 MB/s
Sequential Write : 25.116 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 43.330 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 13.150 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 12.322 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.199 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/01/30 17:38:38

Samsung MCCOE64G5MPP:

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 94.794 MB/s
Sequential Write : 86.774 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 92.378 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 68.579 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 15.583 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 5.387 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2008/12/13 20:36:31

 

Thanks for the info. I'm basically pretty satisfied with my 7200RPM drive. The OCZ SSD I had booted pretty fast, but other than that I didn't notice too much of a difference between it and my current drive. About the only thing I do that's somewhat poky is Photoshop. I wouldn't mind a performance boost, but I don't know that it's worth $200 to me or that I want to give up the space. Unless I happen to wander into a good deal like yourself. I'll keep looking and gathering information.

 

If your sig is correct you'd probably see more improvement in photoshop by upgrading to 4gb of ram unless you get a REALLY good SSD.

 

The R60s memory is limited to 3GB, though I've heard others have put in 4GB. I'm also running 32 bit Vista, which makes more than 3GB a moot point.

ThinkPads of my era: the T60, R60, Z61, etc., are limited to 150MBs thoughput on the the SATA connection as a power saving measure. For one of the really fast drives, I'd need a newer machine.

Photoshop runs fine, just a little slow to load, where I think the faster drive would help speed things up a bit more so than a memory increase.

 

Well you'd get about 3.2 usable, and with the prices of DDR2 sodimms its not much to spend, I got 2 2x2 kits for 20 bucks a pop after rebate for a couple HPs I've since sold. But yeah if its the initial load it may not help you that much, if your using big files and having to swap down to the scratch file a lot you'd see a big improvement in that case. I suspect the 3gb limit would be like HPs (they say 3gb on all laptops that ship with x86-32 operating systems)

 

CF is natively IDE. If you use CF to sata, which i guess is the case of most computer these days, you won't get the lower power advantage as the converter chip will always be running.