Century is about to release a Compact Flash HDD

Slaugh · Post by **Slaugh** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 7:39 pm

Century, a japanese company, is about to release a 3.5" Compact Flash hard drive: The SBD35CF. This one supports 2 or 4 compact flash cards (type I), can be externally installed via a mini-USB port, and can replace any hard drive with both SATA and IDE interfaces. These drives will probably be too slow for normal operations, but they should be dead silent and a perfect solution for backups (especially if the drive is placed in an external enclosure).

If you understand japanese, here are the specifications. Here's an english translation of that page.

(Click here for a more detailed picture)

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 10:08 pm

Kind of neat, but not really anything new I don't think. You can find hundreds of basic CF to IDE adapters on eBay for around $15 shipped.

Now if it did something like RAIDed the CF cards to make one fast logical drive, that would be cool. The specs mention something about 55MBps, which AFAIK would only be possible with CF cards in quad-channel (I think the fastest transfer rate for current consumer flash is ~10MBps).

However there's still the problem of limited durability. You can only rewrite each bit on most consumer flash products about 100,000 times I believe. A Windows or IE swap file would tear it it up in no time.

mathias · Post by **mathias** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 10:44 pm

Well then, don't install windows or IE on it.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 10:49 pm

Touché.

Of course there's always Linux or Windows XPe, I was just pointing the durability issue out for those who may not know about it.

mathias · Post by **mathias** » Sat Dec 31, 2005 11:10 pm

Or you could use hard drive compact flash cards instead of actual flash based ones. But that kind of defeats the purpose. Plus, 1" drives would be complete overkill, I doubt there's many people for whom 2.5" drives, nevermind 1.8" would be too loud.

A side benefit to this being hard drive shaped: if you put hard drive disks in it, it would be hassle free to decouple.

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 12:24 pm

It would have been nice if this supported Secure Digital cards:

http://www.corsair.com/corsair/flash_memory.html

Running Quad Channel with 133x Corsair SD Memory cards would be sweet. It would have over 80MBps of sustained transfer, and be silent. As long as one backs up his data weekly, he wouldn't have to worry about the memory wearing out thanks to the lifetime warranty of the SD cards.

Too bad this will only be sold with Compact Flash connectors. Oh well, mathias's idea of using 1" hard drives instead of flash drives isn't a bad idea and should be more feasible.

Right now, 4GB compact flash cards can be brought for $210 a piece:

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearch.hm ... ia=BA21909

6GB 1" hard drives probably cost less:

http://www.wdc.com/oneinch/

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 12:33 pm

Shining Arcanine wrote:Right now, 4GB compact flash cards can be brought for $210 a piece:

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearch.hm ... ia=BA21909

6GB 1" hard drives probably cost less:

http://www.wdc.com/oneinch/

And 40GB 2.5" hard drives cost less still

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 12:44 pm

qviri wrote:And 40GB 2.5" hard drives cost less still

Are they as quiet as these?

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 12:58 pm

Shining Arcanine wrote:
qviri wrote:And 40GB 2.5" hard drives cost less still
Are they as quiet as these?

Some would say they're quiet enough.

Steve_Y · Post by **Steve_Y** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 10:04 pm

If a 2.5" drive is too noisy then you can always put it in a silencing enclosure. I've seen a few home made enclosures on these forums, or you can put it in something like a Silentdrive, or just pack some sound damping foam around it and suspend it with some rubber bands. Heat isn't the problem it is with 3.5" drives so anything like that should be fine, and even with a commercial enclosure it would still be cheaper than CF cards or 1" hard disks.

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Mon Jan 02, 2006 2:10 pm

qviri wrote:
Shining Arcanine wrote:
qviri wrote:And 40GB 2.5" hard drives cost less still
Are they as quiet as these?
Some would say they're quiet enough.

I have a 40GB Western Digital Scorpio, and I must say, it is not quiet enough. I have very sensitive hearing, so as long as the drive is audible, it is too loud.

Steve_Y wrote:If a 2.5" drive is too noisy then you can always put it in a silencing enclosure. I've seen a few home made enclosures on these forums, or you can put it in something like a Silentdrive, or just pack some sound damping foam around it and suspend it with some rubber bands. Heat isn't the problem it is with 3.5" drives so anything like that should be fine, and even with a commercial enclosure it would still be cheaper than CF cards or 1" hard disks.

Thanks for the idea. I have switched hard drives twice in the past few years and each time the cost was rather high so I think I will try to hold out until there are SATA versions of the Scorpio available at higher capacities.