Thread: VW Jetta

Originally Posted by HiJackZX1

I use SATA extension cables with my setup. Seems to work ok. I think the original cable is like 6 inches, and the extensions are like 12 or 15 inch, so thats about 21 inchs. I was able to hide the HDD and DVD rom better now that I had such long length. It was a PITA to run the electrical though.

I used the longest IDE cable I could find at 36", at the time I installed the DVD drive below the head unit, it too was a pain in the you know what. The length barely made the connection. Just thinking of installing Vista with a USB powered DVD-ROM almost made me regurgitate. I was gonna scrap the project all together, seriously. I took the USB powered DVD-ROM back to BestBuy for a refund.


Did you just say SATA extension cables? Where did you find them at? I could sure use a couple to get the Blue-Ray in the back seats.

Three of the fastest SATA hard drives, their raw performance benchmarks, labels, and how much power they consume on the 5 volt and 12 volt rails.

Starting with the fastest hard drive:
Western Digital VelociRaptor VR300 300GB Hard Drive
Maximum Drive Surface Temperature, score in Celsius 38c


Average Read Transfer Performance 102.00 Mb/Sec
Maximum Sustained Read Transfer Performance 124.60Mb/Sec
Average WriteTransfer Performance 77.50 Mb/Sec
Maximum Write Transfer Performance 127.30 Mb/Sec


Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Drive
Maximum Drive Surface Temperature, score in Celsius 39c


Average Read Transfer Performance 99.20 Mb/Sec
Maximum Sustained Read Transfer Performance 127.30 Mb/Sec
Average WriteTransfer Performance 62.50 Mb/Sec
Maximum Write Transfer Performance 123.90 Mb/Sec


Western Digital Raptor WD150AHFD 150GB Hard Drive
Maximum Drive Surface Temperature, score in Celsius 49c



Average Read Transfer Performance 75.30 Mb/Sec
Maximum Sustained Read Transfer Performance 87.00Mb/Sec
Average WriteTransfer Performance 54.90 Mb/Sec
Maximum Write Transfer Performance 86.70 Mb/Sec

I wanted to share this because power consumption/heat and raw speed are important decision making factors when you're ready to purchase. An interesting note is how much power they draw too. They're listed here as part of my current build specs. Sharing is caring...

Photos, and Benchmarks
Courtesy of: Me

hey that's even better, the added length of the cables are great! Have you tried daisy chaining three of them together yet? curious to know what's the max length tolerable without losing much band with, if any.



Thanks for the link, i'm going to have a look.

*wow, never knew they existed, now I can hide the hard drives deep inside the dashboard! you're the BOMB hijack!

i went with a 2.5 hd single platter its like 5w of power consumption so its possible to use laptop HD's i think you might get more performance from single platter HD's too, you can raid them if you want speed, but im going the CF sata route for my OS, at least i will have to play either with Linux or a windows install and create it to be read only and do writes to HD

yes the ones that i have are not fast, though they are the 266x speed now they have the 300x speed CF cards, and the sata readers are cheap, its possible to do a 4x setup i did only a 2x setup which gave me performance of 54mb read sequential and burst speed but of course the access times are insane

i still say that using onboard igp with external gpu will be best performance wise, and imo going with intel chips you will not have issues with the games and not need to o/c the video cards

also most carPC's will run 7-10" touchscreens with a max res of 800x600 so that you wouldnt need a powerful gpu

as far as heat goes, small area like that can cause issues, but my main issue is when you leave car in parking lot and it gets super hot inside, and by the time you turn on the AC to cool yourself and the car, your CarPC might be hmm really unhappy with those temps, im thinking if that’s the case then water cooling might be the only solution for high performance systems

Originally Posted by drutort

i went with a 2.5 hd single platter its like 5w of power consumption so its possible to use laptop HD's i think you might get more performance from single platter HD's too, you can raid them if you want speed, but im going the CF sata route for my OS, at least i will have to play either with Linux or a windows install and create it to be read only and do writes to HD

yes the ones that i have are not fast, though they are the 266x speed now they have the 300x speed CF cards, and the sata readers are cheap, its possible to do a 4x setup i did only a 2x setup which gave me performance of 54mb read sequential and burst speed but of course the access times are insane

i still say that using onboard igp with external gpu will be best performance wise, and imo going with intel chips you will not have issues with the games and not need to o/c the video cards

also most carPC's will run 7-10" touchscreens with a max res of 800x600 so that you wouldnt need a powerful gpu

as far as heat goes, small area like that can cause issues, but my main issue is when you leave car in parking lot and it gets super hot inside, and by the time you turn on the AC to cool yourself and the car, your CarPC might be hmm really unhappy with those temps, im thinking if that’s the case then water cooling might be the only solution for high performance systems

The compact flash specs are far from being insanely fast, they're designed for high end digital SLR cameras, not for operating systems. A 300x card should be able to write at a speed of 45 MB/s, though not all brands are created equal.

Lexar was the first to release the fastest 300x card @ 8GB. While trying to raid0 two of them may theoretically get you 108MB/s, it is not average sustained throughput.

Although the Compact Flash standard is diminutive in size, using two SATA connectors to do what a velociraptor can do on a single connection is nonsensical.

If my motherboard has eight SATA connectors on it, then that option might be feasible when the price for a single Lexar 300X 8GB plummets.

Have you done the math?

Bear in mind, that a single 8GB 300x retails for a minimum of $180 today. Multiply that x2each=$360.00 without S&H, or tax. Lets round it off to $390, out the door for two.

Don't forget the adapters required to convert them to SATA @ roughly $16 bucks each, x2, plus $390, = What?

For $422 dollars you get a paltry 16GB of tiny storage space that WILL NOT outrun a single 150GB VelociRaptor which retails for? $180

$422= maximum avg Read and write speed 105Mb/s

$180 velociraptor= sustained 120MB/sec Read and write speed

New photos have been added today...Project DiamondPlate is in the works!

Originally Posted by dMand

The compact flash specs are far from being insanely fast, they're designed for high end digital SLR cameras, not for operating systems. A 300x card should be able to write at a speed of 45 MB/s, though not all brands are created equal.

Lexar was the first to release the fastest 300x card @ 8GB. While trying to raid0 two of them may theoretically get you 108MB/s, it is not average sustained throughput.

Although the Compact Flash standard is diminutive in size, using two SATA connectors to do what a velociraptor can do on a single connection is nonsensical.

If my motherboard has eight SATA connectors on it, then that option might be feasible when the price for a single Lexar 300X 8GB plummets.

Have you done the math?

Bear in mind, that a single 8GB 300x retails for a minimum of $180 today. Multiply that x2each=$360.00 without S&H, or tax. Lets round it off to $390, out the door for two.

Don't forget the adapters required to convert them to SATA @ roughly $16 bucks each, x2, plus $390, = What?

For $422 dollars you get a paltry 16GB of tiny storage space that WILL NOT outrun a single 150GB VelociRaptor which retails for? $180

$422= maximum avg Read and write speed 105Mb/s

$180 velociraptor= sustained 120MB/sec Read and write speed

hmm i wasnt saying going high capacity, only for OS and at enough Gigs just for the OS and maybe some other apps, i bought 2gb 266x for like less then 20 bucks and the sata cf cards were like same price, so i did the tests and 2x running 266x i got around 50mb/s burst and sustained so you would need 4x to get about 100mb/s+ which i think for booting up is super fast i think this would all cost you less then 200 for sure and you would have about 8-16gb depends on what you buy, but its not about volume its about increasing speed for the $$$ just for the OS

like i said i have them i did the tests with 2x, there is a lot to play around with, like stripe and cluster sizes, it is completely different then regular HD, i went with higher cluster or stripe and the performance went down a lot, i did find an optimal setting cause you do want the bigger clusters that you can get for the faster reads, its true on HD and would be still true on SSD, but not that big of impact as on HD

when I continue my project I will test and see if the bootup is fast enough with 2x CF 266x’s if not ill go and get 2 more 300x’s


BTW sustained speed doesnt mean much for bootup its I believe the IO that matters for bootup, I read some articles a long time ago but im not 100% sure, the IO with a decent burst speed and super low access times is what counts for bootup if im not mistaking; sustained is only for loading huge files like in a game or copy paste or doing some processing of large files, your bootup files are probably all only few kb’s if at most a few megabytes

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812186051

the CF SATA cards went down in price now they are like $12 each, there is a brand name one but it looks identical to them if you look at them even the ones on ebay are identical

2gb 266x are $19 the 4gb 300x dual channel are about $38

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820208418

So do the math again and you will see you can make an affordable 4x raid 0 CF setup, of course you should limit your writes and probably use the windows XP embedded which can limit almost all writes and offload it to some other place or you can just create and load the image

Originally Posted by dMand

New photos have been added today...Project DiamondPlate is in the works!

i really dig the new look for the carPC, it looks super clean and pro now GJ!