What You Get

There's very little to say about the packaging or the instructions, but actual use of the device itself is fairly straightforward. As you can see it is quite small, with the dominant features being the SATA and power interface connectors at one end (identical to the arrangement on notebook SATA drives) and the receptor for Compact Flash cards on the other end.

Since Compact Flash devices are in reality ATA interface devices, Addonics adapter basically is acting as a SATA to IDE bridge, and uses a Marvell Semiconductor 88SA8040 Bridge Controller. This makes using the device almost utterly seamless, since to the system a plugged in Compact Flash card now appears as a regular SATA device. Not only that, but since we're riding on the SATA interface, CF cards are hot-swappable, something you cannot do with their nearly identical IDE to CF adapters, due to the limitations of IDE.

I say almost utterly seamless, because the bulk of how you leverage this little device, depends on your choice of Compact Flash cards to use with it.

Compact Flash cards themselves will dictate how you utilize this adapter, as they very quite a bit in size, read and write speeds, ATA DMA support, and "especially" for our purposes, whether or not they appear as a removable device or not. Some, as is the case with Hitachi's 3k6 series of Compact Flash Hard Drives, aren't even flash devices. Keep in mind that though these are based on hard disk technology, they're no faster in read speeds than higher speed flash memory based devices, though they do have advantages in write speed.

As is the case when you would decide to deploy such a storage solution for a project, care and consideration has to go into your choice of Compact Flash device to use, and the choices aren't straightforward.

One area where Addonics could do us all a favor, is in providing a list of actual Compact Flash devices they recommend to work with their adapters. Don't misunderstand my caution here, as we ran into no issues here with actual CF card compatibility. The real issue revolves around whether or not the Compact Flash card you'd choose to use supports "UDMA Fixed Disk Mode" or not. For the most flexibility you're going to want a device that behaves as a Fixed Disk, and it's here where Addonics could do their customers a little favor and help them sort through the choices available and give some recommendations. They had to have done Q&A testing of their devices on a lot of CF drives, or so you'd think.

As it stands, your basically left fending for yourself figuring this aspect of the situation out, with this being the only real statement made about the issue on their website.

*while the SATA to CF Adapter is known to be bootable, only certain types of CF cards will be capable of booting off this adapter. A Transcend 2GB Industrial Compact Flash with UDMA Fixed Disk Mode feature was used to do a fresh install and tested to successfully boot Windows XP Media Center 2005 under 40 seconds.

The rest of your choices will hinge on price, size requirements, rated read/write speeds, and rated write cycle lifetime. Luckily price isn't as much of a concern as it once was, as flash memory devices in general have gotten amazingly cheap in a very short time.

Though this Addonics adapter is designed to be a direct replacement for a notebook SATA drive, in most situations Operating System installation isn't going to be as straightforward as it would be with a hard drive in that sort of direct replacement scenario. It's not that you can't simply install an OS on it and be done with it, rather it's the fact you have to pay attention to Compact Flash's inherent strengths and weaknesses, and leverage them as part of a deployment strategy.

Space constraints have to be taken into consideration. Virtual memory access as well is a big consideration if you install an OS that uses paging to a swap file. That's something you're going to want to avoid, since writes to most Compact Flash devices are much much slower than read speeds and take up valuable space. Using Compact Flash cards that arent "UDMA Fixed Disk Mode" compliant will add a step to OS installation as well. More on that as we proceed.

To get a better idea of what we could do with these adapters, we cooked up two installation scenario's to play with. We could have endlessly explored possibilities here, but we stuck with these two scenario's. The first install scenario involved getting Windows XP SP2 installed and running on our 2GB sized PQI 120x Compact Flash drives. The second somewhat more interesting and specialty scenario involved using a minimal install of Windows 98SE, disabling explorer, and creating a direct to game boot environment for a game my children have grown extremely fond of, Stepmania.

Stepmania is an open source Dance Dance Revolution clone, incredibly fun, and entirely capable of wearing out even my energetic daughters. Stepmania is also capable of supporting coin and bill changer hardware, and thus representative of the potential of Compact Flash deployment in a retail gaming environment, something that is already somewhat commonplace.

We used a desktop for conveniences sake, and since (unlike notebook IDE) notebook SATA interfaces are identical to desktop SATA it was fairly easy to do, and just a matter of hooking up the adapter to a SATA cable and SATA power cable. Our testbed consisted of the following desktop system.

• ECS PX1 Intel P965/ICH8DH Chipset mainboard
• Intel Core2 E6300 CPU
• 2GB- TwinMOS 8D25MKTW DDR2-800 DIMM
• Crucial ATI X1600XT PCI-Express Video Card (For XP)
• Geforce 4MX440 PCI Video Card (For 98SE/Stepmania)
• Soundblaster Live Value PCI (For 98SE/Stepmania)
• Xbox DDR Pad modified for USB (for 98SE/Stepmania)
• Hitachi 160GB SATA HDD
• Liteon 165P6S DVD/RW Drive

Let's move on and see what we did with this thing...