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CFast, your thoughts?


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Hello everyone and everybody, nice to see you again!

I consider switching from CF (on USB reader) to CFast Flash cards. Has someone experience with them?

From what I understand, the electric interface is Sata/6000 or Sata/3000 but the connector differs, needing an adapter card. Correct? Is there any bad joke with Sata and CFast, like the varied signalling voltages that plague CF cards?

I plan to buy some Chinese adapter card, as they comprise essentially two connectors and copper lines in between, plus seemingly a regulator. Thoughts?

The CFast cards I covet have 32GB and Sata/6000, my mobo has Sata/3000 from Intel's ich10r, ran with W2k and Xp, maybe Seven some day if needed. Opinions? I can live without the hot plug and unplug, and have some 3rd party software to force-eject a disk.

Other thoughts?

Thank you!

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No experience, but this product sheet (PDF) seems to contain a lot of good things to know:

http://www.advantech.com/products/todatasheet/ce635fe9-06c9-499f-82c2-7574e4f7330a

The *connector is of course different from the old one, essentially good ol' CF cards were an (unmodified) IDE/ATA bus, the CFast is "pure" SATA.

The power voltage is 3.3V for CFast, so most probably the converter/chip you noticed is a DC-DC step-down converter.

I presume you have something like these [1]:

https://www.addonics.com/products/adsacfastb.php

in mind.

But the actual "only" advantage of a CFast Card (AFAICT) is its reduced size (or of course you need it if you have a device, such as a camera that uses CFast as media), otherwise a plain SSD with an adapter *like* this one (internal):

https://www.addonics.com/products/udd25su3.php

or this one (external):

https://www.addonics.com/products/pu25eu3.php

would do IMHO nicely, while leaving you more "flexibility" of using "also" CFast cards.

jaclaz

 

[1] Only for the record, I have no connection whatsoever with Addonics, but in my experience they always provided me with good hardware at what I beleive is a "fair" price.

Edited by jaclaz
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Thanks Jaclaz!

Yes, that's about what I plan. I had already good Apacer Cf, though I didn't use them for very long. Good experience with Transcend EXCEPT that in their 300x 8GB, they put Mlc chips without warning and contrary to their datasheet that promises Slc. Recently, two Toshiba 32GB 1000x went broken at the same time on two different readers - still not understood, maybe a high-tech Usb virus. So I consider Sata instead of Usb.

I already had an adapter, or cartridge, for Ssd on Sata. My bad experience is that the connectors went broken after months, with random bad contacts. Avoid them, everybody - unless someone can report a good specimen he used for an extended period. Meanwhile, I connect and remove my Ssd on plain long cables daily, without a cartridge, and this is reliable over years. So I hope to do the same with Cfast, as I do need a smaller format than Ssd.

My main concern would be some incompatibility between signalling voltages or a similar bad joke that plagues Cf cards. You know, Pata ports in 5V and some Cf cards that need 3.3V for Udma, or even fail to transmit properly on 5V.

More reports, opinions, comments?

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Very "old" CF cards could have been 5 V or 3.3 V (to be picky some PCMCIA cards were 5 V and some were 3.3 V, whilst CardBus ones were 3.3 V only), it was a mess with sockets and "notches":

 AFAIK CFast cards are 3.3 V only and all have the same pinout/connection, so (hopefully) no similar issues anymore.

jaclaz

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