[tlug] Re: [OT] Good 16GB CF card

[Tobias Diedrich <ranma@example.com>]

Hung Nguyen Vu wrote:
> 3. Transcend CF 16GB. 8000 Yen. 133x speed.
> Transcend is a known brand, I have 2 Transcend CF cards and all works fine.
> http://kakaku.com/item/00519610440/

I'm using this one in my Notebook (replaced the HDD) (the 16GB MLC
version).  Works fine (even using UDMA behind the sata bridge of my
Thinkpad R52), linear read is faster than spec (37MB/s == 250x),
write speed as advertised.

However, cheap CF flash sucks as a solid state disk as far as random
write performance is concerned ("apt-get update" and everything that
fsyncs/msyncs is dog slow):

http://www.tdiedrich.de/~ranma/flash_vs_hdd_latency.png
http://www.tdiedrich.de/~ranma/flash_vs_hdd_throughput.png

As you can see, the Transcend flash random write performance varies
wildly in this testcase for some reason.

Random writes seem to be the Achilles' Heel of NAND-flash.

HTH,

-- 
Tobias						PGP: http://9ac7e0bc.uguu.de