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Addonics CompactFlash Adapters Replace Notebook Hard Drives

gizmodo.com — Now here's a great idea from Addonics: replace a laptop's 2.5" hard disk with flash memory, using a $30 adapter that lets you boot from CompactFlash cards. Suddenly you've converted that lappy into a solid-state notebook without spending an arm and a leg. That's what Addonics has done with its CompactFlash Hard Drive Adapters for notebooks

Who dugg this? Made popular Apr 5, 2007

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  • cbreaker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Transfer rate is slower, but access time is very, very fast. You'd be surprised how much of the old "waiting for the hard disk" is actually waiting for many seeks.

    Watch the performance of any virtual machine booting. It doesn't matter if it's Windows, Linux, or MacOS - if you notice, it's not transferring a lot of data. It's all little tiny I/O which flash can provide in abundance.

    I figured the Digg crowd would understand this, but I must be confusing them with the Slashdot crowd..
  • JerodSlay, on 10/12/2007, -2/+142 problems as compared to these huge solid state drives that have been hitting digg's front page:
    1. CF is really slow.
    2. CF isn't nearly as big. (that's what she said)
  • merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Throughput on compact flash generally isn't so hot. The cards mentioned in the article are 9 meg/sec.

    I'm a big fan of SSD, but this is probably a pretty lame hack, unless all you care about is having a (physical) shock-resistant laptop for cheap.

    You'd think they'd be able to fit 4 cards in there, instead of just two, with all the space leftover in the drive, wouldn't ya think?
  • myfanwy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10why is this news? i've had one for a year+ and the idea was around long before i found out about them
  • wounded625, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11doesn't the flash eventually wear out after so many reads/writes? using it as a hard drive is going to ruin it fast.
  • cbreaker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9They're not. CF is basically IDE, so if you notice there's a "Master" and "Slave" flash port - much like the master/slave on an IDE cable.
    They'd show up as separate disks.
  • clickwir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Right.

    And CF to IDE adapters have been around for a long time. And are much MUCH cheaper than $30.
  • spindrift, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Wouldn't using any kind of swapfile on these things tear the cards a new one?
  • nirav72, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8You don't want to put SQL DB and Swap file on it due to the number of write limitations. I was mounting a sqlserv mdf on it for development and I wore out the flash drive in 2 months.

  • Phyltre, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7This will be much-wanted tech once flash grows and speeds up a little more. Although at the moment it's only for some really niche situations...
  • leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1216 Gigs is usually enough for the OS, some programs, and a few emails. The rest can go on regular hard drive.

    But just because it's CF doesn't mean it's solid state.
  • ThatsUnpossible, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Hate to nitpick but what you've got is a hard drive in a CF *FORM FACTOR*.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"I think the connection on CF is actually IDE or some derivative."

    This is correct, and was designed this way purposely. CF uses standard ATA to communicate, so all this adapter does is convert the pinout from the module itself to the chip. And to think they're charging $30 for that.
  • darkspire, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6You would lose a significant amount of performance going to a compact flash solution. Not to mention that the drives are tiny in comparison to what you are getting from a hard drive (capacity, not dimensions). The disks mentioned in the article have 9MB/s throughput, a cheapo SATA HDD in a box I happen to have lying around here is pushing 61.08 MB/s throughput, another box with an old IDE drive in it is pushing 45.9 MB/s. As you can see that's a huge difference. When you start looking at disk arrays you can get even larger performance increases on reads. If you really want to reduce the noise and increase the speed go with a RAM disk. Also, as nirav72 pointed out, the number of writes that CF supports compared to a HDD is incredibly small.
  • sinembarg0, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@leobaby

    How many laptops do you know of that have room for two hard drives? (there are very few) You wouldn't be able to have the CF card and a hard drive in the same pc, unless you put the cf card or the hard drive (a pc card one, not an ide one) in a pc card slot.

    I hope by "But just because it's CF doesn't mean it's solid state." you mean CF hard drives (oxymoron, how can a hard drive be compact _flash_?) aren't solid state, because flash cards are solid state.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"doesn't the flash eventually wear out after so many reads/writes? using it as a hard drive is going to ruin it fast."

    It's amazing we have to keep going over this, again and again and again. Flash does wear out, but its Mean Time Between Failures, the rate in which it wears out, is about 10 times that of your typical hard drive. Other technologies have been added to Flash to cope as well, such as wear leveling (writing to different parts of the Flash to prolong its life) and ECC to protect against random errors. Now, the best part is the whole chip doesn't wear out all at once, even if a few blocks fail, you might lose a file, but the whole rest of the device is fine. Same with hard disks (though failures are a lot less common on single sectors of hard disks, but they do still occur).
  • radu79, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You can get those things for a few bucks on eBay or NewEgg, so 30 USD is a rip off.
    Anyway, they don't really work well,e specially with Linux (didn't try them on Windows). You will get a lot of DMA and IRQ errors since that thing has no such stuff integrated on it. It's just basically a bunch of wires on that board that connect the IDE terminals to the CF terminals.
  • Tyger11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I'd wait for those upcoming unlimited-write models before bothering with this, especially if the claims of 10x faster than current flash pan out (or even half that).
  • panique, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@leobaby - The MicroDrive is NOT Compact Flash. It is a Hard Drive with a Compact Flash-compatible connector. Flash implies the use of Flash memory which indeed is solid state.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"Wouldn't using any kind of swapfile on these things tear the cards a new one?"

    Here's a hint: don't use one. You don't need to once you've hit 512MB (give or take); the OS has very little to gain by swapping things out to the incredibly slow HD instead of just leaving them in RAM where they belong in the first place. So, when you're dropping one of these suckers in, drop in a 1GB SODIMM and be happy with your much quicker PC.
  • Otto, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5CompactFlash to IDE adapters have been around for years and years. The CF plug format is basically IDE, all these things are is some minor wiring. There's not even any circuitry in the things.

    $30 is *way* overpriced. You can get them for $3 to $5. Cheaper in bulk.
  • clinko, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Thanks! A lot of great info in these replies.

    Who would have thought someone tried this already too, saw it fail, read my comment, logged into digg, then commented within minutes.

    Good stuff.
  • clinko, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Anyone have some info on speed of CF vs. ide HDs?

    I would love to put my SQL db and swap file on this, Get ride of the screaming on my SQL server.
  • arkowi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4the shortening of words like laptop into words like "lappy" is stupid.

    carry on.
  • dhughes, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5 To put it in perspective for you, On an AMD Sempron 3000 with 1GB RAM I put a small Linux distribution on a 1GB CF card, I used a CF to IDE converter. It worked but it was painfully slow! For 20 minutes after booting I saw the letter " L " then I saw an " I " and I realized it was LILO which should have taken seconds too what seemed like forever. I gave up before the next L appeared.
  • JohnyD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ leobaby

    IDE is not just vague, it's wrong:

    2.0 revision supports 16Mb/s xfer
    3.0 revision supports 66Mb/s xfer
    4.0 revision supports IDE Ultra DMA 133 (133Mb/s)

  • member57, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's a great idea for a semi-rugged laptop used in high vibration environments without having to spend $4000.00 on a Panasonic Toughbook.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Quite obviously it would go up by (hard drive power usage - CF drive usage).
  • panique, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I think you're the one who is confused. You're speaking of MTBF, which is the number of hours it can be expected to run under _normal_ operation without failure. Normal operation for CF devices is putting pictures or music on it, typically under 10 writes per minute. The other guys is talking about the number of times you can rewrite the same location in a CF device, combined with using it as a computer operating system would, which in some cases means the OS might try to do thousands of writes per minute, particularly to the swap file in a memory-starved (or predictive caching) situation.

    Just check around a bit. There are plenty of discussions about guys burning up their pen drives that they were running their portable OS on. This is because the swap file burns up the flash.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Graphic was shamelessly stolen from the site promoting the product; the "drive" supports two CF modules, and the position indicator tells you which module is which; which will be "Master" and "Slave" when installed.
  • naz37, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@cbreaker

    Even if they are detected as 2 separate drives, they could be combined into a single LVM partition Linux. might be able to do something similar on windows
  • clickwir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Maybe not for you. But there are plenty of other people that would use this, despite the cost and other factors.

    Exactly the reason why CF to IDE adapters have been around for years, because people use them.
  • mabhatter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's expensive because it pulls out the lines for both master and slave... not many notebooks let you do that... it's not trivial engineering. This is the first DUAL CF to IDE I've seen in 3-4 years.
  • Jozer99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Speed comparison:

    1. SSD Disk
    2. 2.5" HD
    3. CF (by a large margin)

    Heres why:
    HDs have decent continuous transfer rates (>50MB/s), but terrible random access speeds (
  • RandomInsano, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I was planning on doing that when my seven year old (but totally awesome) laptop's hard drive crashed. I have a CF to standard IDE adapter that has the pinout for mini ide and was going to solder on the connector when I was convinced to see the light and get 30GB for under $50. It's a nice idea, but for the price of magnetic storage I'd rather just buy a new drive every X years and do weekly backups.
  • Guspaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's true that seek times are very important and often underestimated. But throughput is pretty important too. If you need to load a few hundred megs of executable code off the disk during the boot process, that 9MB/s transfer rate is going to start bogging you down.

    My concern is that this design won't fit in many (most?) notebooks. Many notebooks are side-loading for the drive. My current one is. My last one was. This adapter won't work in any side-loading laptops.

    People also forget that the reason that real solid state drives are so expensive is because of the flash. While promoting this as a cheaper solution, they forget that this is only cheaper because you're getting less flash.

    A better adapter would be in the actual form factor of a 2.5" drive, increasing compatibility with laptops. Perhaps it might also use a smaller form factor of flash to allow more to be used, though this would drive up the cost for multiple reasons.
  • esquire360, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1how would battery life be affected?
  • bodycoach2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I curious if this would work well in older laptops - possibly under 800 MHz. Most of those don't need any more than 8 gig, and if a lightweight Linux distro is used, it might be a good option for hard drive replacement.
  • ActionableMango, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I wonder if you can RAID the two CF cards using striping to increase performance.
  • mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Flash drives have a limited number of write cycles before failure. Putting a swap drive or a very active database server (assuming it has a large number of writes) could wear it out.
  • TRENT310, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've been doing this for a while with a PCMCIA CF card reader (which is just essentially a pin adapter, because CF = PCMCIA) but that's because that laptop supports booting from PCMCIA devices.

    But that's great, now that we have the hard drive problem covered, we need to figure out the display. Glass LCDs are easy to break. OLED?
    Once we get that figured out laptops will be very durable for physical shock. (Optical drives aren't all that important in the proper operatingness of a computer in extreme conditions, right?)
  • JimV, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have no way of knowing, but it doesn't seem like they could die any faster than a normal laptop HD. Those things usually only last two years and then they're gone. And besides, if you have sufficient RAM, you shouldn't be using your swap file much.
  • mabhatter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1From the compactflash.org page CF cards generally use 5% of what a hard drive would use. Even with 2 that's still 10% of a hard disk power usage. That's one very good reason right there. The other two are heat and toughness. If you're mounting a computer inside anything moving often, it takes a terrible beating.. look how many issues HD based iPods have with a slight knock on a table that stops the music. While they still work afterwards, after so many HDs do just stop... flash doesn't care about the knocks.. you'll physically break the connectors or something else first. Car users will love this because Autos are terrible on Hard drive based equipment. Heat is also a problem... it wears the HDDs out faster. Again, mobile things don't do well with heat.. people want them in pants pockets, handbags, coat pockets.. flaming hot 7200 RPM units don't do well against flesh... and again if you cut off the cooling supply they'll burn out faster. The big thing most enthusiasts want the drives for now is 100% quite media centers. Low power Pentium M with huge heatsinks and no fans.... tied to a media server for the heavy lifting. It's all running from RAM anyway so performance isn't an issue after it's turned on.
  • Jozer99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Microdrives (the CF sized ones) are not built to handle that kind of reading and writing. If you use them as you would a normal hard drive, they will fail mechanically in less than 6 months. They are meant to handle the same duty cycle as a compact flash card, that is, in cameras, where they will only be written and wrote to for a few hours a week.
  • jabberwocky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1OK I have been playing with these type adapters:
    What I really want is one that is in the shape of a hard drive that will just drop in. As many laptops require you to dismantle them to fit and replace the CF card.

    They are cool but depending what you do on you computer they may or may not work for you
    Replacing small old hds in old equipment, easier to find than small capacity working hds. If you set win98 up like a live cd, no swap and with ramdisk, that cuts down on a lot of writes. You do need about 32mb memory, NOTE I have not been using them as working computers, just to keep them working condition.
    They are quiet and the CF Card produces a lot less heat.
    Many of the ones you see on ebay require a little modification with a file to get the pins flat to the board on the solder side to get them to fit into the laptop connector
    Speed - write is the main killer . On old hds 1gb, 2gb, 4gb in old equipment they are slow if you use a slow card, less than 10MB's read and 9MB's write.

    I have a fast 4GB one setup in a laptop - linux with network home directory, read only partitions (where i can) and no swap (1GB of memory) . probably improve the setup using a ram disk but it's was just a quick test for watching videos, browsing the web, checking email...and seeing how long the card will last in normal use.

    I also have a desktop ide adapter for testing motherboards with knoppix installed on the CF (boots like the CD + read only) which works very well, faster than cd (no access time) unless you come across certain motherboards and it takes a long time to locate the knoppix image.
    I should imagine it would be good in a mythtv box so the HD is only used when you are watching or recording tv.....
  • TRENT310, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well, I've been using the term for a long time and apparently people understand what I mean, so as far as I am concerned there isn't anything really wrong with that word. And it seems that other people use it too, so again, what's wrong with that?

    I'm surprised I didn't use that in my comment though.
  • TRENT310, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Microdrives aren't really durable at all, probably even worse than a 2.5" drive. I've had too many of both fail on me. At least a CompactFlash card is 'solid state'.
    Hard drives still have a limited lifespan because of its moving parts, and it's not really that much longer than flash memory. We all saw that article on the exploding bridge and camera incident, right?
  • Jook, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1While flash media has write/re-write capacities in the millions or billions of cycles, a major drawback of booting one for a Windows-based OS is something as simple as the File Allocation Table, or FAT. Even NTFS drives use a version of FAT called MFT. And the FAT is ALWAYS stored in the same place, and can easily see 1 million + writes in a single week. Any change to the drives contents, be it in swap or in a paged area or a user mapped area, all written to the FAT or MFT. Raidenwolf had the idea, but from experience I can tell you the mean time before failure of the portion of the flash storing this data is less than 30 days.
  • lucas47, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0does anyone of you know if it possible to use usb thumb drive as solid state disk? is there some adapter like the one above mentioned but not for CF? i would like to use 8gig thumb drive as system drive (primary master) and the normal hdd for data (primary slave) in my notebook. i have some room inside for thumb drive, some wiring ... but not for the CF and CF adapter :(
  • leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1No, but I would call you an *****.

    Yup, a usb hard drive that gets it power via usb. Maybe you should get one.
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136059
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