Built-in Compact Flash-Is it faster than USB 1.1?

[gandy]

Here's the situation.

I have an old IBM Thinkpad X30. This is a small lightweight laptop, 12" screen, 1.2GHZ Pentium III, 256MB RAM, no built-in CDROM drive.

It has two USB 1.1 ports and a built-in compact flash reader.

I'm thinking about installing (XP) on a cf card so I don't need a hard drive. I could probably install on a USB flash drive also since I think it will boot off either one. I can buy an 8GB cf card for around $12. I also have extra flash drives around but they are the kind that stick out pretty far. I know I can buy flash drives that don't stick out very far so that would be an option.

My question is, which is faster, compact flash or USB 1.1?

[sling-shot]

Compared USB 1.1, it probably is. I am not very sure. There is also the factor of the speed of CF reader.

[Just17]

There are often extra USB connections on the motherboard which are not brought out to the case ......  if such exist then a flash stick might fit inside the case ....

I expect the USB version (1.1) will be the limitation regardless what is attached to it

[gandy]

Yeah, the flash drive size isn't really a problem since they make very small ones like this 8GB Sandisk



After doing some Googling, it seems that it might be hard to get XP to boot from either CF or USB. I think CF will be faster f I can get it to work.

If anyone has done either, I would like to hear about it.

[µT6]

windows xp can be made to work in those devices butit willbe slow

between compact flash and usb 1.1 i would choose usb

that gives me 12mbps that can be easily reaxhed by any device compared to the best compact flash that won't offer 10 reading, forget writing

[CaptainSarcastic]

I'd be concerned about being able to boot from the CF slot - on my new netbook, booting from the SD cardreader appears to be a no-go, for instance.

Just a thought - you could put a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card into the cardbus slot, and should be able to get better data transfer rates using that.  Now that I think about, booting from it could also be an issue, though.

[The Chief]

I think you might find that the built in card reader also is actually hooked up to a USB interface. So the speeds will be the same.

[gandy]

I found some more info about the laptop. It said the CF slot is connected to PCMCIA. I think I might be wrong about being able to boot from CF. I successfully booted DSL from a USB stick so I know that works. I think XP would take forever to boot from USB 1.1 or CF.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

[µT6]

yes, you are right

i had a hard disk that had access speeds of 28 megabytes per second and it took 3 minutes to boot xp fully

usb 1.1 would give you like 2 megabytes per second

[gandy]

I thought I'd resurrect this thread because I found a way to do what I wanted.

I was trying to find a way to make a portable music player that can be plugged into AC so that I don't need to worry about dead batteries.

My idea was to use this old laptop, install XP and use a free jukebox program called Arcade Jukebox.

I found a CD that had an old version of XBMC Live and booted it on this old laptop. Surprised that it actually worked, I installed it to an 8GB Sandisk Cruiser. That worked perfectly. Then I put the flash drive in my main machine, copied around 2 GB (401 songs) of MP3s to the Home/Music folder. It boots in around 3 minutes and takes about 30 seconds to load the files. I still have over 3 GB space on the drive. 

Now I have exactly what I wanted. A portable music player that will run on AC or battery if I want to buy one (batteries are still available for this for about $25). No spinning drive so battery time should be much better also less delicate. The only downside is that I need to use headphones or amplified speakers since the laptop only has one tinny sounding speaker.

I plan to take it to work and connect it to my JVC boombox that has RCA input jacks so I don't have to listen to the only classic rock radio station I can pick up. They play mostly Top 40 stuff that gets very repetitious.