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I'm trying to breath some new life into an old Thinkpad X40 by replacing its HDD with a couple of CF cards. I've found a nice adapter will let me install two cards into the notebook's drive bay and plug them into the parallel ATA-3 bus.

The CF big cards are pretty expensive. The big, fast cards are even more expensive. I'd like to get one as fast as possible, but I don't see any point in buying cards that are faster than the IDE bus. Does anyone know what the maximum speed of that bus is? Google isn't helping me here.

fixer1234
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1 Answers1

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This is a bit complicated because the ATA-3 spec was only a draft, never a final specification. Thus it's hard to say what version of the draft your system claims conformance with. The latest ATA-3 spec states a maximum PIO speed of 16.6MBps, and a maximum DMA speed of 33MBps.

That's the bus speeds, you also have to consider the CompactFlash card's speed, and what transfer technology it supports. Cheap CF cards do not support the faster DMA transfer and you'll be stuck with PIO. (At the time of writing) CF Cards go up to 133x, which is 20MBps, and will be the limiting factor if you get one that supports DMA.

The CF 6.0 Spec includes data rates up to 167MBps via IDE DMA Mode 6 ports. This may not apply to your question, but is included for completeness.

Chris S
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