OK, it seems that the ATA LIF connector on Toshiba drives (like the U810 has) are not entirely compatible with ATA ZIF connectors (like some iPods have). No idea why - but it makes a difference when looking for CF-ATA adapters.
The one I had before was ZIF and wouldn't work. I thought it was the CF Fixed/Removable problem but I was wrong. I saw other people with the U1010 - which, for whatever reason, uses a pin-style connector (very like compact flash) for at least some of its drives - have no problems with CF cards with Removable mode.
So, it must be the adapter and I need to find one that is Toshiba LIF rather than iPod ZIF. Another trawl around ebay nets me an alternative mode, the MW-CF18ZIFADP which is orange and only seems to come from Taiwan. I know it has ZIF in the name and says iPOD compatible but in very small letters it also says "compatible with Toshiba". I now have one and it works - with the additional benefit that it has a metal shell that make it exactly the same size as a Tosh drive and thus fits snugly in the U810 without rattling about.
The ZIF/LIF difference is subtle though - both work fine in my ICY-DOCK USB caddy for 1.8" drives, just not with the U810 ribbon cable - go figure!
Now, it's great to hear about all these 64GB and 100GB CF cards but, quite frankly, I'm not seeing any. Looks like the 133x Transcend is the one I can get. It's good for around 20 MB/s read/write which is not bad in comparision with the Tosh drives which are faster at peak but way slower when you get to the inner tracks. There are cheaper Adata and Peak 32Gb cards but these have a write spead of around 3 MB/s and read at 10 MB/s which is pretty glacial. Pretec have announced 266x and faster cards at this size but I've yet to see many for sale. I guess when you can charge 2-3 times as much for the same stuff in SSD format it's pretty obvious where the effort goes.
3 comments:
Hi Neil,
I also have the U810 and have been trying to maximize battery life on it, that's why I was intrigued by your ingenious idea to use a 32GB CF card as a HDD replacement. I'm very tempted to get the Kingston 32GB 133x card that's on sale at Buy.com (http://www.buy.com/prod/kingston-32gb-compactflash-elite-pro-133x/q/loc/101/210728700.html). A few questions:
1. If I get the MW-CF18ZIFADP adapter, would I be able to use the Kingston card even though from your experience it would not be recognized as a fixed drive?
2. How is the day-to-day experience of using Vista after you replaced the HDD with the CF card? I mainly use my U810 to play games, watch movies, read ebooks, and surf the Web.
Thanks,
Tom
P.S. I did some more research and another Toshiba-compatible CF-to-ZIP adapter on eBay (item #280360137518) states that a UDMA CF card is required. I found a pretty good deal for a 233x 32GB UDMA CF card from here:
http://www.supermediastore.com/ridata-32gb-compact-flash-233x-cf-card.html
The Kingston is slow to read so I'd avoid it.
One of the first things I did was to remove Vista so I can't comment on that. It was poor on the u810 to begin with...
The Ridata has a better write speed than than the Transcend but poorer read speed so it may well be acceptible. With Linux I can tune the OS to minimise writes but with Vista the greater write speed could well be valuable.
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