Re: Tuning for Compact Flash

[jim owens <jowens@hp.com>]

Christer Weinigel wrote:
> 
> I have a Thinkpad X40 that I'd like to replace the Hitachi hard drive 
> on.  The drive is 1"8 with a normal 2"5 PATA disk connector on the side 
> and such disks are not manufactured any more, so I went out and bought a 
> Compact Flash adapter and a Transcend 133X 32 GByte Compact Flash.
> 
> I installed Fedora 9 on the Compact Flash, with a small boot partition 
> and then one large encrypted LVM partition where I put the swap 
> partition and an ext3 file system.  This turned out to be bog slow, 
> write speed to the ext3 file system seem to be about 1MByte/s which is 
> just horrible.  Since Transcend claims 45MByte/s read bandwidth and 
> 16MByte/s write bandwidth, this seems much too low.

CF is not an SSD.  A CF is designed and spec'd to store large images.
Neither CF nor USB thumb drives are intended as a primary system
hard drive.  They work great for transferring data between machines
but no filesystem or tuning will make them perform with the same
characteristics you expect of your primary hard drive.

jim