Ahhh... it's the serenity (CF in Portable)

[shred]

I've installed one of the PowerMonster CompactFlash to 2.5" SCSI adaptors into my Mac Portable. It uses a cable I made up years ago to go to the proprietary Mac Portable motherboard socket.

So quiet...

The old 2.5" drive was starting to suffer from sticktion and was pretty noisy.

[EDIT] I originally had one of the Acard AEC-7720U SCSI to IDE adaptors + and IDE to CF adaptor working with the Portable. The Acard board needed a firmware update to work, but then went perfectly. The trouble was that the two adaptors stuck together were just that tiny little bit too big to easily fit in there with the lid closed and the IDE to SCSI adaptor made an annoying high pitched hissing sound (like the backlight inverter).

 

[aphetica]

Wouldn't that make it practically silent? Are there any fans at all in a portable?

I'd really love to do the CF thing with one of my PBs someday.

 

[shred]

Almost silent. There's a bit of noise still from the backlight inverter. With 8MB of RAM and a LocalTalk to Ethernet router (does TCP/IP), it's still quite a useful machine.

 

[TheNeil]

Very nice job

Does the Portable 'see it' OK? Are there any formatting issues? (my pit of a brain is telling me that there's something 'quirky' about the Portable and certain versions of the Apple disk tools)

 

[shred]

Does the Portable 'see it' OK? Are there any formatting issues?

The Apple disk formatting tool does not recognise the compact flash (no surprise there). Silverlining formats it ok, but the Mac Portable is a bit picky about which version of it you use.

Strangely enough the CompactFlash card had already been used in the ACard adaptor and just booted up in the new adaptor without any re-formatting. I was a bit wary that there might be some subtle problems if I kept using it, so I re-formatted it for the new adaptor and copied everything over from the old hard drive again.

 

[Bunsen]

a LocalTalk to Ethernet router (does TCP/IP)

Oh. What are you using there?

 

[Byrd]

Can I ask how much did the PowerMonster adapter set you back? I've been tempted to buy one for all my SCSI 'books but can't find them anywhere.

JB

 

[Maconthemove]

I googled arund and got a $99.00 price.

 

[bluekatt]

nothing to do with portables but i am going to place a 4 gig cf card in my ibook as welll

 

[shred]

a LocalTalk to Ethernet router (does TCP/IP)

Oh. What are you using there?

It's an EtherRoute TCP made by "Compatible Systems". It encapsulates TCP/IP in AppleTalk packets, so you can use old Macs as telnet / SSH terminals, check your e-mail and so on.

 

[shred]

Can I ask how much did the PowerMonster adapter set you back?

Bought it off the guy on eBay. US$89... worked out to $108 by the time I paid freight, so not cheap unfortunately.

 

[JDW]

I for one would like to see some real world speed comparisons. I want to know how fast it "feels" versus a stock hard drive. I want to know about the speed at boot, when launching apps, when writing big files -- all the major tasks one normally does with their Mac. I asked this to Manabu Sakai of ARTMIX (seller of the Power Monster) and he refused me such information. He would only say vague things like "it doesn't support DMA" or "I won't guarantee performance." Makes one think that this Power Monster is actually pretty slow and not worth the price. Of course, I was inquiring as an SE/30 owner, not a laptop owner. But still. The performance comparison would be able the same, I expect.

 

[bluekatt]

there was a lowendmac article where somebody reported that booting woudl take 4 minutes but othr then that there was no noticble differenc eunfortunaly i cant find that article any more

 

[shred]

I could always chuck my old hard drive back in and do some tests. Since the "old" drive was not the original Conner 3.5"/20MB drive but a later model 2.5"/80MB drive, the tests may not be valid for people with standard Mac Portables though.

The type of CompactFlash used would also affect the outcome. I'm currently using a cheapie CF card discarded from a digital camera. A quality, high speed card (eg one of the more upmarket SanDisk cards) would almost certainly make a big difference if the adaptor was in a faster Mac - they make a big difference in a DSLR camera when writing RAW files.

Seat of the pants wise, there is a noticible improvement in performance, but it is not startling. With a 68000 processor, I don't think the hard drive is the bottleneck!

 

[JDW]

I would certainly appreciate your putting back in the stock drive and doing some real world tests, even in comparison to that cheap flash card. I have fundamental doubts, based on my dialog with Manabu Sakai of ARTMIX, that this flash adapter really can put out greater or lesser speed based on the TYPE of flash card used. Manabu Sakai led me to believe that the speed differences between a cheap and expensive card would hardly be noticeable at all, even on an SE/30. Again, DMA is not supported. And I don't know if any other special features of newer, more expensive flash cards are even supported by that Power Monster interface hardware. For that reason, I would certainly appreciate seeing the results of your tests, comparing a real hard drive to the flash drive, and then also (if you can) comparing some flash cards with each other to see if there is indeed any perceptible difference in speed between them.

Thank you!

 

[register]

As it comes to performance, there is an industrial grade solution available, called DoubleDrive. It is a CF-SCSI-adaptor. The device uses a pair of two industrial CF cards in a RAID to optimise for performance, called RAID 0: "striping". The CF cards have to identify in "fixed disk mode" in the adaptor. Most consumer grade CF cards lack this feature (which is the cause, why they fail to be usable as a boot device in place of an internal harddisk in a PB 150 or 1400). Unfortunately the adaptor will flatten at least USD 100 plus lots of additional bucks, depending to the size of CF cards you want to use.

 

[Temetka]

How many read / write cycles are these cards rated for?

I seem to recall all types of flash memory were limited to something like 5 million read /write cycles. Will the CF card hold up to working as an HD and constantly being written to and read from?

Otherwise this seems like something I might do for my 5300. Along with rebuild the battery and put in an active matrix LCD. Oh and wifi.

 

[JDW]

register, can you provide a link to product info for us?

Also be sure to see my questions on the other flash drive you propose, in this thread.

 

[shred]

My understanding is that the number of read cycles for flash is unlimited, but a single memory location can only take between 100,000 and 1 million write cycles. The number of cycles depends on the manufacturer and the specific technology used.

The better quality CF cards implement "wear leveling" so that you don't get one memory location (eg for disk directory) exceeding its maximum number of write cycles, while others are never written to.

I reason that using CF is ok, with the following provisos:

1. No paging file on the flash drive

2. No multi-user databases

3. Make the drive larger than needed, so the frequently written memory locations make up a relatively small percentage of the available space.