CF Adaptor for $1.99 (pcmcia)

[davidfig]

For you california POTN'rs. I was down a frys today and I picked up a compact flash adapter for pcmcia. This should be great for PC laptops. This may become my new memory stick. ;)

[anshu]

how fast compared to a usb 2 card reader?

[davidfig]

Well I did some tests and it seems slow. It transfers just under 2Mbyte a second. Thats 3 seconds for RAW files. If you had 100 RAW files that would be about 5 minutes. It was a quick test, but I don't think tweeks well help. But that's what I am checking next.

[davidfig]

Oh wait. I don't think CF cards support DMA. I'll have to see.

[DavidW]

Dumb CompactFlash PC card adapters are quite slow. The CompactFlash pinout is a subset of the PC card pinout, and these devices just make the physical and electrical connections needed.

Lexar and Delkin make Cardbus CompactFlash adapters, which are much faster - in the same sort of ballpark as a USB 2 CompactFlash reader. I have a Lexar one, which I'm delighted with.


If you have a very new laptop with an ExpressCard slot, you can get ExpressCard/54 CompactFlash readers (which I'd expect to use the USB 2 functionality on the ExpressCard slot, rather than the PCI-Express functionality), though it's not possible to fit a CompactFlash reader into the narrower ExpressCard/34 slot (so owners of the latest Apple laptops are unlucky).



David

[ssim]

I had a pcmcia slot on my last Dell laptop and it was brutally slow in comparison to using a card reader on the same laptop. I would estimate that it took at least 3 times as long using the card as opposed to the card reader. I just ended up carrying around a small card reader that I picked up somewhere for around 10.00.