Fastest CF card?

**scsirob** · 04-16-2005, 06:13 PM

I've just been playing with Win-98 and 98Lite on a LEX Twister MV823A system. This is a 1GHz fanless box that may become my in-vehicle PC. The LEX has an on-board CF slot, which makes it *really* nice and tidy. It also support video overlay input

Boot time is pretty fast, from power on to desktop in about 20 seconds (12 seconds BIOS POST, 8 seconds Windows load)

So far I found quite a speed difference when switching between an old 4200rpm laptop disk, a decent Maxtor 80GB disk and a Transcend 256MB CompactFlash card. The CF card is just a little slower than the Maxtor HD, the laptop disk is considerably slower.

What I'd like to know is has anyone here done any comparison on CF speed for this? Also, in real life, how long will a CF card last before it fails when I switch virtual memory off on Win98? I'm guessing Win98 will not write too often in that situation, thus avoiding early write failure

**SFiorito** · 04-16-2005, 06:24 PM

in order from slowest to fastest: SanDisk UltraII, SanDisk ExtremeI, SanDisk ExtremeIII. All 3 of those are faster than any other CF card out there. As far as how long they'll last, well how much thrashing does Win98 do? It's been years since I've used Win98 so I'm not sure, but there may be some registry tweaks you can do to minimize disk writes like the ones we use for XP.

CF card speed comparison: http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...?cid=6007-6133

**mattress** · 04-17-2005, 09:17 AM

i got a lexar 80x which said it was "the fastest" we'll see when it gets here

edit: aw crap, now I find this chart and see how far down the list it is LOL

**bcweir** · 05-19-2006, 07:23 PM

Actually there is a way to reduce the amount of disk thrashing that Windows 2000 and XP, but there's a catch -- you have to be running more than 256 Mb of RAM in Windows 2000 or more than 512 Mb of RAM in XP.

To do this, go into regedit and look for the following registry section

These registry tweaks will force 2000 and XP to load the core system files in RAM instead of running them from the hard disk. It also creates a larger system cache in RAM to speed performance.

For other system registry tweaks, go to

http://www.fox2k.net/2ktweaks/system_speed_tweaks.htm

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Se ssion Manager\Memory Management

Change ONLY the following settings:

DisablePagingExecutive change to 1 (hexadecimal 1 DWORD)
LargeSystemCache change to 1 (hexadecimal 1 DWORD)

Reboot.

I am not affiliated with this site and take no responsibility for any improperly executed registry tweaks. Do not go mucking about in your system registry if you don't know what you're doing. You can cripple your system by mucking around in your registry. You've been warned.