UKBouldering.com
technical => photography => Topic started by: Jim on February 19, 2008, 07:56:44 pm
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I've been looking into solid state drives for my HTPC project (quieter and quicker than normal hard drives) and at the moment the best (read:cheapest) solution seems to be a compact flash to sata card which means I can have a 4gig CF card as the hard drive and will speed up running everything (media files are on network strage).
Anyway, back to photography. This will be a good solution for those using CF media as it is significantly quicker than a normal card reader. They are also hot swapable (ie no reboot). I'm still lookng into which one I need but they come in 3.5" bay mount (floppy drive size), rear PCI slot mount and internal (which I need)
(http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/images/adsacf_detail.jpg)
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Nice heads up Jim. I've seen PCI based multicard readers around, not S-ATA. There's a few 3.5 floppy and multicard combos around, but a bit more costly.
Can you run your OS off a CF drive? Can't see why not.
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you can also p-ata ones as well.
You can run OS off them, thats what I'm getting mine for
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Excellent idea Jim - i'd never thought of something like that for noise reduction.
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i'd never thought of something like that for noise reduction.
what does this mean bubs?
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If you run the OS from a solid state card instead of from a hard drive, then there's no hard drive whirring noise :)
I guess you can run a smaller fan as well, but i might be wrong on that point.
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when i got my machine i did look at getting a card reader into one of the 3.5" bays (are the really much/any faster than using a USB2.2 speed CF reader? not that these things are slow.), but couldn't be arsed in the end, what with USB card readers being almost free from 7dayshop.co.ck and the like.
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yeah my card reader is very fast too.
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USB card readers are very slow in comparision
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Jim can't wait ten seconds, he needs it in two!
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It is quicker with SATA. I noticed it mainly when I'd been away for 2 weeks and was downloading 4GB of RAW. If it's a few pics here and there you probably wouldn't bother about the speed difference.
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a few gb of raw doesn't take very long. seems like a lot of faff.
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Each to their own Cofe. It's dead easy to add a SATA CF drive to your PC, but I guess if you already have a USB2.0 card reader there's not a lot of point in uprading. I prefer to have everything internal if possible, I hate USB leads trailing everywhere.
I'll be interested in how you get on running an OS from CF, Jim- let us know.
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I'm on the look out for a decent, well priced internal reader, then will be putting it in.
Worth noting that a lot of motherboards have eSATA ports on them now which is hotswapable
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Don't want to tread on any toes by going off-topic, but I came across this HowTo for installing (yep you guessed it) Linux on CF media here (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-83983-highlight-.html), although it was started in 2003 and the author has indicated that its superseded by official documentation on creating embedded systems (http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/).
The whole concept sounds quite interesting, and I may well consider it when (if) I get round to upgrading my home copmuter.
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Hopefully SSD drives will of come down by then