Hard Drive vs. Compact Flash

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

Hi Donkey Agony

I too have a 7200 rpm Hitachi in a Thinkpad (T41p). Transfer rates, as
measured by Linux's hdparm util on my machine are
823 MB / s read from buffer, 33 MB / s read from disk.

I don't have stats on writes, but that's where hard disks will really
shine. Also - note that those speeds for flash will be for contiguous
reads (block reads) where the data is all neatly lined up. It's much
harder to do random reads / writes, and here hard disks will again come
to the fore.

Yes, solid state devices can be a lot faster than a mechanical hard
drive (think RAM, or, indeed, the buffer of a hard disk!) but it all
comes down to cost.

Peter

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

trogger@gmail.com wrote:
> I too have a 7200 rpm Hitachi in a Thinkpad (T41p). Transfer rates, as
> measured by Linux's hdparm util on my machine are
> 823 MB / s read from buffer, 33 MB / s read from disk.

Wow, that's quite a difference compared to even the fastest CF cards!

> Yes, solid state devices can be a lot faster than a mechanical hard
> drive (think RAM, or, indeed, the buffer of a hard disk!) but it all
> comes down to cost.

Well, CF cards obviously aren't RAM in terms of speed.

Interesting. It seems CF capacity is roughly where HD capactiy was ten
years ago, but I bet that even then HD speeds would have whooped a
modern fast CF.

I wonder when we'll finally have something in the same form factor as
Type 1 CF with the speed (at least!) and capacity of today's Hitachi (or
other 7200 rpm) hard drives in the mass market.


--
da
~~
"OE Quotefix"
http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/
to fix Outlook Express' broken quoting.