Talk:CompactFlash boot drive

Just finished tidying up the first few parts a bit... Certainly needs further editing... Some of the information and statements need to be generalized and should have less emotional and personal sentiment... (2008-07-13)

misc notes...

• SanDisk has industrial CF cards that can be ordered as fixed disk, but they are expensive!
• Pretec 333X looks interesting (50MB/s read, 40MB/s write), but it seems that the SanDisk Extreme IV, SanDisk Ducati Edition and Lexar 300X all outperform it in real world tests. They are available though up to 24GB, if you can afford it ($800)
• STEC Mach4 CF looks very interesting (90MB/s read, 55MB/s write) with 16 and 32GB, but no price, or any way of ordering any of their products indicated, and no independent speed tests to confirm claims (it looks like they are pure OEM only).

Most ThinkPads such as the T40, T41, T42 and X40 have Intel IDE controllers, which are limited to UltraDMA Mode 6 (= UltraDMA/100). The SATA to IDE bridge chip in the ThinkPad T43 and X41 is limited in the same way to UltraDMA Mode 6. UltraDMA Mode 6 means that the transfer speed is limited to 100MB/s, which is the equivalent of a 666X speed CF card (100 / 0.15), although in practice a slightly slower card will probably already max out the interface due to protocol overhead.

Pictures

Please upload them if you don't want to link to Flickr. They are freely licensed.

• With USB adaptor
• In dock

Cons

I used to be able to boot from an external USB drive. However after installing the CF drive, I'm unable to find such options in F12. Hendry 23:28, 4 August 2008 (CEST)