The $99 dollar SSD has arrived

[halfmanhalfamazing]

I found this:

http://www.opensubscriber.com/messag...g/6818048.html

in one of the postings it suggests that an IDE cable being too long may affect performance. I'll have to get my hands on a female CF/IDE adapter that will allow me to eliminate that.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822998003

He's using the same card as I am and getting much higher transfers. I'll have to snatch an intel based system and give this a try..............

[paulsiu]

I am no expert, but I think the problem you may be encountering is that most compact flash do not support UDMA in fixed disk mode.

A compact flash has 3 different modes: I/O, Memory, and True IDE. The last mode is the one that makes a Compact Flash appear to be an IDE fixed disk.

The problem is that the standard states that a CF card must have an True-IDE mode, but it does not state that it will support UDMA in True-IDE. So your extreme card is fast in other modes, but bottlenecked by running in PIO mode when it is simulating a hard disk.

Unfortunately, vendors like Addronics don't seemed to do a good enough job of specifying which device will work in UDMA Fixed Disk mode. So far, the only card I think will work are Industry Compact Flash that states they support UDMA Fixed Disk mode. One such card would be Transcend Industrial CompactFlash, but I don't think there is a 266x or 300x version. In any case, this is just a guess on why you can't go into DMA mode.

[Thetargos]

What are the hdparm -Tt results?

Currently for one of my ATA disks it is:

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   938 MB in  2.00 seconds = 468.36 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  116 MB in  3.01 seconds =  38.51 MB/sec

And it is a Seagate 80Gigs drive:

 hdparm -i /dev/sda

/dev/sda:

 Model=ST380023A                               , FwRev=3.33    , SerialNo=3KB125H9            
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=?16?
 CurCHS=4047/16/255, CurSects=16511760, LBA=yes, LBAsects=156301488
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 udma3 udma4 *udma5 
 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2:  ATA/ATAPI-1 ATA/ATAPI-2 ATA/ATAPI-3 ATA/ATAPI-4 ATA/ATAPI-5 ATA/ATAPI-6

For an ATA-100 drive in UDMA5 mode, I've always thought it was pretty slow... Compared to my other 80Gig S-ATA Seagate:

hdparm -i /dev/sdd

/dev/sdd:

 Model=ST3808110AS                             , FwRev=3.AAH   , SerialNo=            5LR4A3D2
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=8192kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=?16?
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=156301488
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 
 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: Unspecified:  ATA/ATAPI-1 ATA/ATAPI-2 ATA/ATAPI-3 ATA/ATAPI-4 ATA/ATAPI-5 ATA/ATAPI-6 ATA/ATAPI-7

hdparm -tT /dev/sdd

/dev/sdd:
 Timing cached reads:   986 MB in  2.00 seconds = 492.35 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  204 MB in  3.01 seconds =  67.85 MB/sec

But from what I can make out of these tests you've run, it would seem that CF has a clear advantage when it comes to overall latency.

[joshuapurcell]

Here is the same command output ran on my old Thinkpad T40:

joshua@laptop:~/work/wrigley$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing cached reads:   1644 MB in  2.00 seconds = 822.06 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   96 MB in  3.04 seconds =  31.61 MB/sec
joshua@laptop:~/work/wrigley$ sudo hdparm -i /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

 Model=HTS421280H9AT00, FwRev=HA3IA70S, SerialNo=HKA371AKC8BM6M
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
 RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=7528kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off
 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=156301488
 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 
 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 
 AdvancedPM=yes: mode=0x80 (128) WriteCache=enabled
 Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 1:  ATA/ATAPI-2 ATA/ATAPI-3 ATA/ATAPI-4 ATA/ATAPI-5 ATA/ATAPI-6 ATA/ATAPI-7

The drive is nothing special... I believe it's a 4200RPM 60GB drive, which is the default that came with the laptop.

[Thetargos]

It has some nice buffered reads numbers.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

I am no expert, but I think the problem you may be encountering is that most compact flash do not support UDMA in fixed disk mode.

A compact flash has 3 different modes: I/O, Memory, and True IDE. The last mode is the one that makes a Compact Flash appear to be an IDE fixed disk.

The problem is that the standard states that a CF card must have an True-IDE mode, but it does not state that it will support UDMA in True-IDE. So your extreme card is fast in other modes, but bottlenecked by running in PIO mode when it is simulating a hard disk.

Unfortunately, vendors like Addronics don't seemed to do a good enough job of specifying which device will work in UDMA Fixed Disk mode. So far, the only card I think will work are Industry Compact Flash that states they support UDMA Fixed Disk mode. One such card would be Transcend Industrial CompactFlash, but I don't think there is a 266x or 300x version. In any case, this is just a guess on why you can't go into DMA mode.

Thank you for your reply, I had read a little bit about the three modes of compact flash drives but you laid it out nicely.

I'm pretty sure that that's not directly the problem though. I've tried many distros at this point, and most will not recognize the card at all, some see it and lock up. Suse is one of the few that I've used in the past few months that works properly, albeit with slower transfers than I should be getting. I've been testing out the suse 10.3 betas, I'm pretty sure that my issues are all driver related. It wasn't until beta 2 that YAST would load up properly, and only one of the available 5 ide drivers at boot time would work properly.

As I've posted previously, HDPARM does report this as supporting UDMA mode 3.(I think. it might have been 4)

As far as the adapter I'm using, there's nothing to it. All it is, is essentially a series of short wires that allow the CF to plug into the IDE cable. There's no bridge chips or anything, meaning that there's a direct connection from my IDE motherboard adapter to the CF card. The adapter doesn't technically 'support' anything any more than a standard IDE cable does. It's just wires.

Some of the CF adapters out there do have bridge chips, as they connect to serial ATA.

I think that most of my issues are primarily driver related, and I think that it revolves around those three modes of compact flash. I've been trying to get ahold of an intel based system to do some testing with to see if that makes any difference. One of the links I recently posted, a guy has the same card as me and is getting much higher transfers.

And of course Michael said that a phoronix review is coming at some point, still waiting for that too.

[paulsiu]

It may be a driver issue, but I was under the impression that most of the distro pretty much use the same set of code.

In the case of the compact flash, it's just emulating an IDE controller, so one would assume tht the device would look just like a drive to the OS. Have you talk with the vendor to see what they recommend?

Have you try to do this under a different OS like Windows or BSD?

Paul

[halfmanhalfamazing]

It may be a driver issue, but I was under the impression that most of the distro pretty much use the same set of code.

In the case of the compact flash, it's just emulating an IDE controller, so one would assume tht the device would look just like a drive to the OS. Have you talk with the vendor to see what they recommend?

Have you try to do this under a different OS like Windows or BSD?

Paul

I only own a copy of windows 2000 but with the compact flash card plugged into my ide win2k wouldn't boot. I brought out an old HD and installed w2k, just having it plugged in after the OS is installed freaks it out. Starting off of the CD gives the same result. It did the same thing when I had the extreme 3 card, which does not support UDMA.

Yes, I emailed Sandisk for any information they could provide but all i got was crickets.

I honestly never even thought of giving BSD a try. I'll do that when I get a chance.

[Kano]

Why don't you use usb? Much faster than your old ide interface and with a good bios no problem to boot.

[paulsiu]

Why don't you use usb? Much faster than your old ide interface and with a good bios no problem to boot.

Now, why would you say that? When I use a USB drive, the speed has always been slower than the internal ide drive and uses more cpu utilization.