On Sun, May 20, 2007 at 01:39:22PM -1000, david wrote: > Michael Nelson wrote: > > >I'm interested in using a CompactFlash-to-SATA adapter, and booting > >from a CF card. Does anyone know what the speed/reliability would be > >like? > > I think it would be pretty slow - my CF cards seem to give only > 5-6MB/sec transfer. Even my slowest hard drives run a LOT faster than that. There is something strange with compact flash on IDE on linux. I've seen speed problems with several brands, but I'm going to talk specifically about kingston since I have detailed data sheets for their CF cards. Standard cards get about 5MB/sec write speed. This is about what speed they are supposed to get. However, when I upgrade to "100x" cards, my speed actually starts going down and there are kernel errors printed about accessing the flash. According to Kingston data sheets, these "100x" cards should be getting about 16MB/sec writes, which is vaguely in the ball park of IDE, and plenty adequate for most audio work. > Plus - CF has a limited lifespan when it comes to writing to the card. > > I'd suggest a bootable Live Linux DVD, or just use a hard drive. I suspect that a bootable live dvd is going to have an even worse life span. And if you can live with the boot media be read only, then why not make the boot CF card read only? Do any actual recording to either a second CF card or a USB memory stick or something. Newer flash chips have radically longer life spans (50 million writes per cell instead of 1 million, and the ability to remap cells that have been written to too many times). _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
