Author: Scott Piercy

Editor: Nigel Woodford

Model: Addonics ADSAHDCF SATA/CF Adapter

Manufacturer: Addonics

Price : $35.99

While there is currently a lot of industry buzz around the evolution of flash memory for mainstream computing, it's a technology that's been with us for a good long while. In recent history, it's become the storage medium of choice for mobile devices such as cellular phones, digital cameras and PDA's owing to it's compact size, shock resistance and meager power requirements. Also, we've seen a veritable explosion in the use of USB "Thumb Drives". USB Flash memory devices today are about as ubiquitous as mouse pads, and far more useful.

Still, flash memory as a storage medium has been around for over a decade and a half, with it's primary implementations being in military, medical, flight avionics systems, and anywhere that rugged shock resistance and low power requirements were needed. Though still far slower than that magnetic data storage system we primarily rely on today (hard disk drives), improvements in speed, reliability, tolerance of write cycles, and cost have far outpaced the same historical improvements with magnetic storage. Though still a technology primarily leveraged in specialty applications, it's becoming more and more useful in more mainstream applications.

It's with this in mind that we asked Addonics to send us one of their SATA-to-CF adaptors. This isn't going to be a review chocked full of whiz-bang benchmarks, though we did run a few to give you an idea of some of the limitations of using Compact Flash as a primary storage medium. Our focus is going to be on what you can actually do with it, and why you'd want to use it.

Let's move on to our ubiquitous specs page, then we can get into the device itself.