Thread: Sandisk Extreme III 1GB CF

Are you going to the 'fest in Calgary? If so.. We could meet.

What are you using to boot it off? USB-CD adapter or IDE-CF adapter?

What would be fastest? From that long thread where sfiorito gave his comments I seem to recall that usb would be quickest but hardest to find a compatible mobo...

If you're planning to use a CF card then you need to get a CF-IDE adapter. The USB problems I was having were in regards to using the uDOC which is a USB solution for XPe (I got the driver working on XP though).

Hey Sfiorito, first I'd like to thank you for basically taking this entire section of building carpcs on your back... You have made more progress than all other users together in this area I think...

Anyways, please clear the following for me:

- Extreme III is the quickest CF card out there for our purposes, right?
- I will only be running the OS/maybe some apps. with EWF and HORM.
- Using Opus (what is the ACPI problems I read about? or am i confusing apples&oranges?)
- Can you recommend a CF-IDE adapter, I heard that some e-bay cheapos dont work as quick/as well as others?

Anything I should be aware with this choice?

Originally Posted by BMVEE

Are you going to the 'fest in Calgary? If so.. We could meet.

No I'm not going to bimmerfest

I'm on business in the USA until ~September. I haven't ever been to bimmerfest because I'm always in the USA in the summer You have fun anyway...

Originally Posted by RoyN

- Extreme III is the quickest CF card out there for our purposes, right?

Correct, it's the fastest CF card. The uDOC is even faster but it's more problematic (i.e., you need to find the right mobo and getting the XPe driver installed in XP is a bit of a pain).

Originally Posted by RoyN

- I will only be running the OS/maybe some apps. with EWF and HORM.

Yeah, that's fine, but see below regarding hibernation with the ExtremeIII...

Originally Posted by RoyN

- Using Opus (what is the ACPI problems I read about? or am i confusing apples&oranges?)

The ACPI issue you're thinking about is probably the ExtremeIII appearing as a "removable" drive to XP. This means that Standby and Hibernate do not work on the ExtremeIII. I don't know why, but XP (and XPe) freak out when you try to Standby or Resume when your system drive is marked as removable. So if you want to use ACPI functions you should go with the ExtremeI or UltraII.

Originally Posted by RoyN

- Can you recommend a CF-IDE adapter, I heard that some e-bay cheapos dont work as quick/as well as others?

The fastest one I've used is from LogicSupply.

Originally Posted by RoyN

Anything I should be aware with this choice?

Just the ACPI issues when using the ExtremeIII. Unfortunately, SanDisk has decided to get out of the "industrial" market for CF cards so I don't expect them to ever create "fixed" ExtremeIII cards. Too bad...

What would be the "next fastest" then? What would ou recommend in this situation for the above requirements...

No way to trick it into making the hiberfil.sys file first time and then EWFing?

Sfiorito, sorry for bugging you so much...

Do you have any comment on the items listed here?
http://www.logicsupply.com/default.php/cPath/44

They have CF cards (more expensive than a Extreme III) and also what looks like a DOC, plugs directly into IDE slot... from a brand called TRANSCEND (I have never heard about them!)

EDIT: scrap these, they are all 45x when the ExtremeIII is 133x and the ExtremeI and UltraII as 66x... any reason for ExtemeI over UltraII or vice-versa?

those IDE DOC's are really slow. 5MB/sec I think. ExtremeI and UltraII are almost identical. I think my ExtremeI got maybe 1 second faster boot times.