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CF vs SD storage

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First post, by Andy1979

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Just tried out my Pentium 133 (430HX) system with CF and SD to IDE adapters, which are each mounted to an expansion slot bracket.

I had intended to use the CF card as the main drive, with the SD adapter serving as a means of transferring files to/from the machine since I'll be using DOS/Win 95 and it doesn't have USB. Annoyingly the SD adapter is Cable Select, whereas the CF adapter only has a Master/Slave jumper. I can get the BIOS to recognise both drives on the same controller, but the SD adapter always ends up as C: I'm using an 80 pin IDE cable since these support CS mode by default. Suppose I could put the SD on the same controller as the CD drive (which has a CS jumper), or use the CD drive with the IDE connector on the SB16 I just won on eBay.

Thought it would be interesting to benchmark the two drives (using ATTO under the Win98SE install that was on the existing hard drive). As expected both beat the original 640mb Quantum Fireball HD which had a max transfer rate of 2.5MB/s, however the original HD is faster than the CF card at 0.5K and 1K writes.

For reference my CF card is an 8gb PNY Elite Performance 80MB/s card (the only 8gb card I could find new) and the SD card is an old-ish Samsung Pro 8gb SDHC.

This is the CF result

CF.gif
Filename
CF.gif
File size
15.42 KiB
Views
785 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

This is the SD result

SD.gif
Filename
SD.gif
File size
15.55 KiB
Views
785 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

I'm guessing that the IDE controller is the limiting factor at higher file sizes, so was surprised to see the SD card come out on top. Something makes me think the CF card should be more reliable in the long run though?

My Retro systems:
1. Pentium 200, 64mb EDO RAM, Matrox Millennium 2mb, 3DFX Voodoo 4mb, DOS6.22 / Win95 / Win98SE
2. Compaq Armada M700 laptop, PIII-450, Win98SE
3. Core2Duo E6600, ATI Radeon 4850, Win XP

Reply 2 of 3, by Andy1979

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konc wrote:

The million dollar question: Partition alignment?
If not, try benchmarking the CF again with the partition properly aligned. You'll be surprized 😉

Good question. No, I've not aligned it (yet). The SD card wasn't aligned either though, so I thought it was a fair comparison.

My (limited) understanding on alignment is that the flash card probably uses 4K blocks internally, so I should format it along the same lines to speed things up - is that right? Windows 10 diskpart should allow me to do this?

I only have a retail copy of Win 95, so will have to use FAT16. My plan for the system is to dual boot NT4 and have 2 x 2gig FAT16 partitions for Win95, and then 1 x 4gig partition for NT4. Any advice on getting all of those partitions aligned properly?

My Retro systems:
1. Pentium 200, 64mb EDO RAM, Matrox Millennium 2mb, 3DFX Voodoo 4mb, DOS6.22 / Win95 / Win98SE
2. Compaq Armada M700 laptop, PIII-450, Win98SE
3. Core2Duo E6600, ATI Radeon 4850, Win XP

Reply 3 of 3, by Falcosoft

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The million dollar question: Partition alignment?

Unfortunately partition alignment is only sufficient for NTFS partitions since in case of NTFS meta information is part of the file system (MFT). But in case of FAT16/32 the data blocks can start unaligned even in case of an aligned partition. So you would need careful calculations of Root DIR + FAT(+FAT copy in case of FAT32) sizes that are disk/partition size dependent.
If you want to avoid manual error prone calculations you can try RMPrepUSB:
http://reboot.pro/topic/16783-rmprepusb-faste … -memory-drives/

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