Compact Flash to IDE/ATA adapter?

[DennisCNC]

Any one have experience with these? Do they work like a regular HD? I want to use it instead of a regular HD for a cnc dedicated PC.

http://www.1powershop.com/en/compute...-cf-2-ide.html


Thanks

[rustamd]

I know alot of carPC people use them to get 7-12sec start ups. Check over at www.mp3car.com for more info

[svenakela]

Yup, they work great and the can take a bumpy ride without crashing. There's also a guy somewhere in Asia that use to have an ad at eBay with two CF connectors, a couple of friends ordered them to run in old laptops (in the car, that is). No problem at all.

Regards,
Sven

[P.Passuello]

I use the setup you are considering for my cnc router pc. It is brilliant
The card identifies as a harddrive on your pc and works the same. In my case I am using turbocnc on dos, so my CF card has the entire operating system, turbocnc and the file I want to cut on it.

The reason I did this is to make it easy to transfer my files to the pc as dos does not network very well and the floppy drive was too small to hold some of my photovcarve files (several meg). It all fits on a old 8meg CF card.

It's boot time is very quick, 30 seconds
I put the card in my Desktop pc and drop the required file onto it.
Plug it in on the cnc PC and away I go.
You won't be disappointed.

PS get one that is externally mounted either on the back or front of the PC.

Cheers
Peter

[Bubba]

I also use one for my Turbocnc setup. I have Dos and Turbocnc on the the cf card permanently setup internally and then use a jump drive to hold the cutting files.
In other words, I treat it like a hard drive and do not remove it to change the g-code files. one of my concerns is the "limited" writing times of the cf so I made all the files (including the ini file) Read Only on the cf. About the only thing that changes is the "last position" which I don't care about anyhow as normal setup procedures always includes homing to make sure everything is where it is supposed to be anyhow.
Works like a charm and have used it for about a year now.

[P.Passuello]

Hi Bubba,

I haven't come across jump drives but a guick google search shows it to be a usb flash drive of some description. How do you access usb from within DOS? The inability of DOS to use usb was the main reason for the CF card in the first place.

It hadn't realised there were a limited number of write cycles for CF cards but at 100000 cycles it should take years for me to wear one out. Especially as I like you do not write to the card in the normal course of machining. Only the part file is changed.

[Bubba]

I found a series of files on the turbocnc group file section that loads the necessary drivers to allow the use of the jump drive. It does NOT allow hot swap and has to be plugged in when you boot the system, but it works for me.
It took some trial and error to get things setup as the documentation was not the greatest in the world for this dummy. I need 1....2...N documentation to figure things out:}) Anyhow, now have it working and I have used a couple different drives in this setup. If you want more info or the files, let me know.

[Switcher]

Similar thread...

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43640

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[DennisCNC]

Thanks for the tips, got the card and reader on the way.

[rustamd]

will this be for your router or bridgeport?

[DennisCNC]

Here is the card and IDE connector. I will do some test in a little to see how windows likes the card as a HD.

[ger21]

I see 8Gb cards on Ebay for about $70. 2 of these might make a nice Mach3 machine.