SD to CF adapter off Wish - is it any good?

[Rouxenator]

Looking at the prices of CompactFlash cards these days, should you need one, you might want to consider cheaper alternatives. Well there are not a lot of options, but one such option is a cheap SD to CF adapter off Wish. This is just to give an idea if it works.

First off, I am using a cheap Ugreen USB2.0 card reader so that means 480mbps USB so we will not see any speeds above 48mb/s.

Here's what we're working with :


Run 1 - SanDisk Extreme CF card :

I guess this card reader on USB2.0 won't go any faster than 35mb/s then

Run 2 - Adata microSD card :

Not bad, smaller writes works faster over the higher speed serial interface of the microSD card than what the older parallel-ATA compact flash does.

Run 3 - CF adapted Adata microSD card :

Slightly faster reads with reasonable writes - neato.

For my usage this will be perfect, I have a thin client PC that uses CF for the hard drive and the faster random writes the SD card in the CF adapter gives will be a welcome upgrade.

 

[The Door]

Looking at the prices of CompactFlash cards these days, should you need one, you might want to consider cheaper alternatives. Well there are not a lot of options, but one such option is a cheap SD to CF adapter off Wish. This is just to give an idea if it works.

First off, I am using a cheap Ugreen USB2.0 card reader so that means 480mbps USB so we will not see any speeds above 48mb/s.

Here's what we're working with :
View attachment 1244780

Run 1 - SanDisk Extreme CF card :
View attachment 1244782
I guess this card reader on USB2.0 won't go any faster than 35mb/s then

Run 2 - Adata microSD card :
View attachment 1244796
Not bad, smaller writes works faster over the higher speed serial interface of the microSD card than what the older parallel-ATA compact flash does.

Run 3 - CF adapted Adata microSD card :
View attachment 1244800
Slightly faster reads with reasonable writes - neato.

For my usage this will be perfect, I have a thin client PC that uses CF for the hard drive and the faster random writes the SD card in the CF adapter gives will be a welcome upgrade.

Very cool, thanks for the feedback.

 

[bwana]

First off, I am using a cheap Ugreen USB2.0 card reader so that means 480mbps USB so we will not see any speeds above 48mb/s.

Wouldn't it be worth eliminating that bottleneck first before testing? I get double those speeds with my Sandisk Extreme CF card using a USB 3 reader, but who's to say if the adapter can keep up?

EDIT - fwiw the fastest SD card I have, a Sandisk Extreme Pro, can't keep up with the CF card in the same reader.

 

[Rouxenator]

Wouldn't it be worth eliminating that bottleneck first before testing? I get double those speeds with my Sandisk Extreme CF card using a USB 3 reader, but who's to say if the adapter can keep up?

EDIT - fwiw the fastest SD card I have, a Sandisk Extreme Pro, can't keep up with the CF card in the same reader.

Very good point - in retrospect I should have spent that few rands more getting a proper USB 3.0 reader that does all formats. It would give far more insightful results.

But I guess purely to determine if the SD to CF adapter is a bottleneck, seems not to be the case at lower speeds.

Once I have this hooked up to my beast of a computer with it's VIA C7 1ghz, 1GB RAM and Windows XP we'll see if this adaptor comes close to the UDMA-6 speeds the BIOS supports.

 

[Rouxenator]

Plot twist - while the Windows XP installer had no problem seeing the 64GB drive (Adata SDXC microSD) in the adapter, the ancient Insyde BIOS did not detect it so I could not boot off it.

I do have this very old type-II SDHC to CF adapter that I thought was broken, but it works just fine. Event with the 64GB SDXC although it only shows as 32GB which is the limit of SDHC.

My card reader does not support the higher type-II CF card so I'll just use the old one in the PC then.