CF versus IDE HDD results

[Bunsen]

Dumped the IDE hard drive results this morning. CF was done a couple of weeks ago.

Graphical:

Text version:

CF worth it? Oh heck yeah. No sounds whatsoever. Feels weird now to have a spinning disk in there. Also, if something goes wrong, it's a dual slot adaptor, not like I can't put another card in there to get another bootable card for another application. Or if it runs into trouble, pull the card and put a new one in, but the Industrial variants have a MTBF of 1 million hours, so I figure I have a long ways to go.

Mac details: Oh yeah and I dumped MacBench 4.0 onto the hard drive, I wasn't about to run it off the network or CD.

Originals: [1] [2] [3]

[Mk.558]

Anybody else doing this sort of thing?

Seems quite quiet now...

[Charlieman]

The three tables at the top are interesting. For tiddly files (smaller than 128KB), the performance benefits on read access are modest, but these are the file sizes that are most common for Mac OS 7.6 Macs. Apart from the System file and Finder, how much in the System folder is bigger than 128KB? Does Mac OS 7.6 make a difference? -- block sizes would be smaller with HFS+. The 1MB file size performance improvements are pretty conclusive, however. If your data files are sound, video or graphics, CF will make your Mac snappier.

Without intending to sneer at a Duo 2300 (which I'd love to use), it isn't the model that will most benefit from CF in performance terms. I am tempted to put one into my PB 3400 (or rather, I'm happy to know that it is a realistic proposition when my hard disk dies).

[beachycove]

My 2400c/180 was noticeably faster with a CF drive installed internally, and indeed, the results were more dramatic. It was not so good in the PCMCIA slot, however.

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Interesting about the differences in performance there. I wonder if it's the PCMCIA controller that's the bottleneck?

[Mk.558]

I nearly forgot about this, but...

The Duo's IDE connector has a blank pin, it is visible on the photo below. If you are upgrading to a CF solution (highly recommended) then you'll have to break off the pin. In this adaptor, I followed the pin and it was just a ground pin. As they say, "Mind your pin 1!" and it is certainly true. Make quadruply sure you are looking at it right.