Compact Flash on Sam440

Is anyone using a compact flash card as a hard drive on their Sam440? Is there a noticeable speed improvement over a normal hard drive?

@Astral

I'm using such a device with a cheap CF->SATA adapter.

It's slower than a real HD on my machine and are the two reasons (to me) :
- I can only use UDMA mode 2 or best pio)
- I cannot use SFS and only FFS. (I don't know why)

I'm pretty sure that a 'real' adapter should work better. (I think Vesalia sells good one).

Anyway, it serves me well alongside my SSD (which works like a real HD and supporte UDMA6, SFS, etc.) and my Sam is totally noiseless.

@Astral

I have one even if I'm not using it dayly. It was just to try.
It's this:
http://www.itechnews.net/wp-content/u ... r2t-cf-sata-enclosure.jpg

I have only one CF card of 2 GB.

It's faster than a HD but not that fast. With the CF I can boot in something like 17 seconds instead of 20.

@Astral

Me too I'm using a CF, formatted SFS.
Had a bit of trouble because of the CF speed.
Now I'm fine with a TRANSCEND 300x UDMA.

I love working completely noiseless, it feels incredible after a whole day using a PeeCee!

Is anyone using a SSD disc?
Is there a speed increase? I'm considering such a device. But it's quite expensive.

@Antique

I bought a Kingston SSDNow V series, the 2.5" 64GB model.

It's not the best one but it was afordable (around 120? with the 3.5" desktop kit)

It's faster of course, but if you have a fanless sam, well, there no noise at all. At the beginning, I found that very strange, now, I'm realy enjoying the silence. (I don't start any other computers anymore but my Amiga 600)

64Go seems quiet small for someone who have tons of mp3 and video files. But it's enough for me. (I've a external SATA drive for backup purpose, ISO files, etc. and a 4Go Compact Flash on a CF->SATA adapter for my download directory)

Heh, the HD is the only noise from my Sam440, and even that is not audible unless the room is *very* quiet. (Due to the lack of a power led on my case, I often think my Sam is turned off when it is actually on, and so press the power button when I shouldn't!)

If I really wanted total quietness, then I think having some utility to turn-off the HD when inactive would be better than going for a tiny CF that can barely hold anything. There used to be such a utility(s) for OS3.x, but I guess they won't work on OS4.x/SATA.

@Astral

I have a 30GB SSD on my Sam! It is speedy and silent! I'm switching to SSD all my computers, but i'm waiting costs goes down. My MacBook has already a 120GB SSD, was the first.

once you gone SSD, there is no come back

@Elwood

I have been trying to get the CF to boot, but after installation, I get an error that there is no SLB entry. Any tricks or suggestions? (sam440ep, amiga 4.1, 4.1update and 4.2 update tried). CF to SATA is plugged into where the hard drive was (sata20).

@ChrisH

Quote:

I know you posted this a while back but since this thread is now here, and in case you don't know it yet, you can use "idetool" in the shell to spin down or put to sleep your HD.

eg.
idetool -p DEVICENAME UNIT POWERMODE (spin up 2, spin down 3, sleep forever 5)
idetool -p sii3114ide.device 0 3

I made a script in s:shell/ named it HDSleep, gave it an icon and put it on AmiDock.

But AFAIK, the spin down/spin up is not so "healthy" for hard drives.

hope this helps