CrunchGear

I call BS.

1) Why CF? So far as anyone is concerned, it’s dead and slow. If you want large flash memory, you use SD.

2) Consumer flash-based memory cards have a limited lifetime. In short, they die after writing to them too much. With a digital camera, that’s OK, it’s millions of hi-res photos. But with a hard drive, it’s just weeks of normal usage.

This company is making a fake, and they’re trying to woo the world with it.

“CompactFlash defines a physical interface which is smaller than, but electrically identical to, the PCMCIA-ATA interface. That is, it appears to the host device as if it were a hard disk of some defined size and has a tiny IDE controller onboard the CF device itself.”

Basically it’s already directly compatible with IDE ports and I guess a simple IDE to SATA chip is all that’s required for SATA compatibility. This kind of thing isn’t new; I have a similar device I bought a year or so ago for a MiniITX project but it isn’t DMA compatible so it’s very slow and hogs CPU cycles. To be honest, I don’t think even with UDMA133 it would be any faster than a 7200rpm hard disk except maybe for random file seeks.

Good thing the adapter has a drive activity LED. Otherwise the inside of my laptop wouldn’t know when there was activity on the drive. I guess?

SD is an evil format supported by the reclusive SDMI to bring DRM to our desktops and MP3 players. CF is actually faster and has higher capacities. 32gb and 64gb CF cards should be out soon enough