A little known company name ACS makes a useful adapter for any one who wants the shock proof reliability of a solid state hard drive. The Compaq Flash to IDE Adapter is cheap quick way to get solid state storage. When I found the CF to IDE adapter I couldn’t help my self. The idea of using a CF chip as a hard drive was too temping.

The top two reasons are speed and energy efficiency. Compaq flash uses a lot less energy then regular hard drive. Using any where from 90% to 96% less power then the common ide hard drives. With no moving parts there is less seek time. Depending on the specs of the flash chip being used the speed can be higher then 45mb per second.

The draw back to using any flash device in place of a regular hard drive is a shortened life span. Each block of storage has a physical limit to how often data can be written and erased. For use in Mp3 players, digital cameras, and PDA this really isn’t a problem because the data written to those devices often stay there for a long time. If you are using a Compaq flash for your swap file the chip will fail.

Having used ACS’s CF-IDE adapter as a hard drive I have to say that my disappointment was with the CF chip I used. Any improvement to speed is very dependent on the CF chip. The ACS adapter did just what it was suppose to do. The adapter let me use a CF as a mounted IDE drive, not as a removable drive.

Weather I was using it to boot Linux or using it for virtual memory on a window computer any speed improvement was not noticeable. Testing didn’t seem logical since I could not find a 4 gig hard drive to compare to the 4 gig CF chip I was using. When I tried my test software failed the CF chip claiming read arm malfunction.

I keep the adapter handy; I will use it again when larger and faster chips come down in price. I figure I’m more likely to use it for projects where vibration and impact shock are going to ruin norm hard drives. Or a small physical size is really needed. Definitely not something that has a lot of uses, but ASC’s CF-IDE adapter is an option worth knowing about.