Compact Flash harddrive woes

[Qjimbo]

I recently purchased an MSI Fuzzy CN700G mini itx motherboard and built my system with the intention of using a compact flash card as a harddrive.

I bought a Samsung 16gb compact flash card from ebay (hopefully it's not a fake) and plugged in a SATA to Compact Flash adaptor. Everything ran really slow, so instead I bought an IDE to CF adaptor, however it's still far too slow to use, and keeps "seezing up".

To find out more about what was going on I plugged my 80gb harddrive (what I'm using on it now) as IDE master and the card as secondary and ran Drivespeed32 to benchmark the drives. On the harddisk it was normal, but on the CF card the CPU usage rocketed to 100%, the computer kept going really jerky. I also tried using another 128mb CF card and it did the same thing.

Is there any way of solving this problem? Is it a BIOS issue or something that could be solve with the right windows configuration? Any advice would be very much appreciated!

Thanks =)

[staffsMike]

They aren't designed to do what you're asking of them plain and simple.

You can do it as proven.. but it will always be unbareably slow.

[malfunction]

The CF card probably doesn't support UDMA mode and is using PIO instead. Translation = the CPU has to fetch everything from the card and put it in memory vs the CPU asks for data which is placed in memory without using the CPU and the CPU is notified when the data is there... (not 100% accurate I'm sure but that's the general picture). There are CF cards out there that do support UDMA and should be a lot less painful. If you have the cash though something like this:

Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

would be a lot easier and probably quicker even than a UDMA supporting CF card

[Qjimbo]

Thanks for the info malfunction!

I did have a feeling it might have something to do with PIO since I saw that mentioned on a website when I was googling. Looks like I'll have to return the compact flash card! Luckily I've only had it for just over a week.