George Wright's Blog: Using a CF disk in an X40?

Using a CF disk in an X40?

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:37:00 +0100

Has anyone seen this - it seems to be fairly interesting. I’m tempted to do it myself as the disk drive in my X40 has died on me..

eBay seems to have the relevant components for about 70 GBP.

"Using a CF disk in an X40?" by Russell

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:53:28 +0000

Tomas –

What an excellent idea! I wish I had thought to do that. The 32 GB card I’m running in my X40 seems to have a hardware errata that prevents it from doing DMA. So, I’m stuck in PIO mode most of the time. It’s painful for writes.

I figured that was what would probably happen for such a large, cheap CF card, but it was better than throwing the computer away. If only I’d thought to buy the dual adapter!

"Using a CF disk in an X40?" by Tomas

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:38:05 +0100

I just completed this exact same conversion, after seeing a post on some forum. I actually bought a dual-IDE-to-CF converter and am running it with an 8Gb CF for the OS, and a 16Gb CF for data.

One tip though. My initial CF cards were an 8Gb SanDisk Extreme IV (as fast as i could find), and a cheap Advanced Micro 16Gb card. Unfortunately the 16Gb card would fail after resuming from suspend, in that it would be mounted read-only. I recently replaced it with a sandisk extreme III card, and now all is working flawlessly. I’ll be popping the Advanced Micro card in a PC-card to CF converter and using it as a backup destination for rdiff-backup, as well as for some less important data.

"Using a CF disk in an X40?" by Luca

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:48:19 +0100

I had great success using CFs in older IBM notebooks, namely TP600s. I use them for vehicle navigation, so their resistence to vibration is what made me use SSDs in the first place.

In my personal experience they are fast, silent and reliable - so good that I now put them in other TP600s I use as cheap, simple thin clients.

"Using a CF disk in an X40?" by George Wright

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:27:54 +0100

The CF card is the expensive bit at around 60 - 70 pounds on eBay. The adaptor is about 1 pound…

"Using a CF disk in an X40?" by Jon

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:34:20 +0100

Tempting! 70 seems steep, is that mostly for the CF card? It’s hard to determine which adaptors would be suitable but the ones I’ve seen are < 5 GBP. I’d probably try it with a smaller capacity CF card.