[Discuss] compact flash drive versus USB flash drive?

[David Bronaugh]

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> On 2007-10-07 07:11-0700 Murray Strome wrote:
>
>> From: "Alan W. Irwin" <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca>
>>> [..] This micro PC
>>> has one "CompactFlash Type I/II socket" designated for a solid
>>> state disk
>>> (SSD), and 4 USB 2.0 ports.
>>>
>>> Thus, it looks like I will have a choice of buying a compact
>>> flash card or a
>>> USB flash drive to use as my SSD.
>>>
>>> [...] Does it matter
>>> which I buy or does
>>> one format have some known advantages/disadvantages compared to
>>> the other?
>
>> My guess would be that depending upon the way the computer is designed,
> the Compact Flash COULD be faster.  That is assuming that it is connected
> directly to the internal bus.
>
> The compact flash socket has an ATA interface, but those come in various
> speeds so its hard to know whether that will be faster than a USB 2.0
> interface or not.  Has anybody here compared recent compact flash sockets
> with USB 2.0 flash disks for speed?
I've done some benchmarking, around a year ago.

I bought a 1GB ATP 150x CF card - it's CF 3.0 or whatever, so it 
supports ATA66 when in true ATA mode. What we observed was that we got 
about 13M/sec read/write speeds from it after overhead.

Previous versions of compact flash were purely PIO -- so they maxed out 
at 16M/sec and ate all your CPU while doing that. They're worth avoiding.

You can get some very fast USB drives nowadays -- 30M/sec and up. And 
the cost is less than CF. IMO, CF is a dying format. I'd go with USB. 
Just look around for speed benchmarks.

David