OT - hardware related - but not PI

CF cards are really small form-factor PCMCIA cards - at one time you could get a passive adapter to fit them in a PCMCIA slot. Traditional PCMCIA carried the ISA bus[*], and IDE is related to the ISA bus, hence you could use a CF card as an IDE drive in a PCMCIA slot.

But IDE is just one mode CF cards can talk - there are others. Generally a camera or similar is not using the IDE mode. So this means you couldn't plug your IDE-to-CF adapter into a camera or other CF device and expect it to work - it would only work if the CF device was only using the IDE mode in the first place. The rest of the time the IDE drive wouldn't respond.

This is why you can't buy them, because in most cases they wouldn't work. Selling something that doesn't work in most of the use cases is not a road to riches.

So either of your options of buying a bigger CF card, or an SD to CF adapter would be worth trying. I'd guess you can buy bigger/cheaper SD cards nowadays than CF cards, but beware in case there are size limitations (I think SD has protocol limits at 4GB and 2TB, and IDE at 8GB and 128GB) - it may be the adapter is only good up to a certain size.

Theo

Personally I'd wait until the unit arrives before opening it up and seeing what there is to work with. I wouldn't be remotely suprised if there is a space on the board just waiting for you to put a 40 or 44 pin IDE socket in it and solder in place. I know I've had a few Neoware terminals in the past that were the reverse of what you describe - 44 pin IDE socket on board but space to solder in a CF card socket if you were so inclined.

Couple of points to bear in mind: IDE is 5V only for signalling.

Secondly is that CF cards use a lot less power than even laptop drives. Are you sure the power is there for a hard drive? Many thin clients only have supplies in the 60W range for the entire system, sometimes less.

Finally, is there even space in the case to mount a hard drive anywhere?

Ok, that sounds reasonable

I'll go SD-to-CF-adapter first

Thanks for the details

That would be nice

Noted

Hmm, this one has lees. 30 w I think I read. I did think of a 2.5" drive, but I also have 1.8" It was an replacement for an ipod gen 4

Good question. I do not know.

It should arrive in the week. Exiting

I'm very dubious. I tried using those 1.8" Microdrives perhaps a decade ago. Kind of worked, but drives for the likes of an iPod are very aggressive when it comes to power saving - they'll spin down after a few seconds of inactivity, and then take a few seconds to spin up again.

Is that within the drive, or is it the iPod firmware that requests the spin-down?

Did anyone here use an 1.8" drive with the Pi? Via USB? Experiences would be interesting to know of.

However I am also a bit hesitant now - mostly because I realise adapters are difficult for them. And of course since I don't know yet if there is a way to solder on an IDE port at all on the motherboard.

There were also these:

Theo

Interesting. I headed to ebay and got 2 6Gb. delivery early March though

I would expect performance to be absolutely, diabolically, awful :-) Even the cheapest nastiest flash CF card would be a lot quicker.

But there's something to marvel at fitting a full HDD mechanism inside a CF card, even if the result is not very useful today. I wonder if you could replace the lid with a clear cover and watch it thrash...?

Theo

So, The cpu is slow The disk is slow there is only 1 Gb of RAM Naturally I expect the system to run slow on it.

I develop Warehouse Control systems for a living. I like to try to fit it into small devices. I'll use the thin client for compiling the system.

I prefer a hard-drive, since I think daily compilation of 1.2 locs will kill the flash soon.

Yes, I could go with a usb 2.0 but where is the fun in that?

The advantage of testing on a very slow system is that it might reveal timing issues that would not appear otherwise.

I did port the system to the Pi, but I cannot run it properly, since both MS-sql-server and Oracle still lack non-java drivers for ARM platforms. It runs on postgresql - but then our client does not support pg :-(

Now, I get to test it for real

Thanks for your input

The drive's firmware so you don't have control over it. This was in a Neoware thin client.

Ok, I'll then try to

echo $(date) > /tmp/date.dat

every other second or so, to keep it spinning

On 31 Jan 2023 10:33:57 +0000 (GMT), Theo <theom+ snipped-for-privacy@chiark.greenend.org.uk> declaimed the following:

In one of my photo bags is a small drive with rechargeable battery (after all these years, probably won't hold a charge -- good thing the drive can be used from charger plug). The unit had slots for all 5 major memory card formats of the period.

One would insert a card, press the copy button, and the card contents would be copied to a (newly created) directory on the drive.

Problem these days? It is a 40GB (unformatted) drive -- and the camera in that bag now has 32GB CF cards! (Maybe a few 16GB, but I think I moved those to the other camera [8Mpixel vs 15Mpixel], and moved that one's 8&4GB cards to the even older 4Mpixel P&S camera [I'd been using a 256MB card in that camera, had a 64MB card for secondary, and the factory provided card was a whopping 32MegaBytes -- could only hold about 12 photos!]). Could only back-up one filled CF card (and you don't want to do multiple backups while filling the card, as each backup copies everything).

Presumably you would use the copy-from-CF-to-HDD device just for making a safety copy while you are away from home (or freeing up space on the camera's CF card), and you will empty its drive once you get back home and save all/most of the photos to permanent storage. Given that, how often will you fill up 40 GB while you are away from your permanent-storage computer?

They were/are a good idea: more portable than taking a laptop and maybe an external USB hard drive, though a laptop does give you the ability to preview pictures and determine whether there are any problems that may need you to re-shoot photos. A camera's back-screen is OK at a pinch, but not as good for showing exposure/focussing errors.

Can it take SDHC (the high-capacity version of SD) cards? Since your camera uses CF rather than SD, it may not matter, but it's always worth having something that cam copy SD in case you need to back up contents of a cellphone etc which uses SD. I also carry around in my cellphone case a micro-SD to normal-SD adaptor so I can read a micro-SD card (from a phone etc) in a computer that only has a normal-SD slot.

On Fri, 3 Feb 2023 09:27:47 -0000, "NY" snipped-for-privacy@privacy.invalid declaimed the following:

Hard to state -- For the dSLRs I'm configured to save both RAW and JPEG in parallel. Without digging up the camera, I think that comes to about 900 images (from the 15Mpixel) per 32GB CF card.

It was useful back when my CF cards were in the 1-4GB range (I actually have a mixer/recorder -- BOSS BR-600 -- that won't work with a CF card larger than 1GB!). I could fill a card with images from a day out, then back it up to the portable drive.

I suspect not -- it is ancient <G>

The SD card in my phone is barely touched...