Well, here's an update. I chain upgraded from 8.04 up to 9.04 with absolutely no problems. Each upgrade through the Update Manager took about 30-45 minutes. I then tried to do the 9.10 update. The install took about two and a half hours, maybe more. When it rebooted, it hung on the white Ubuntu splash logo. I rebooted and grub gave me a bunch of kernel options. None of the kernels would load. Either it would hang during boot, or it would give me I/O errors. This seems like an issue with the newest kernel, or maybe just with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10. But I also had the same errors with the newest Puppy linux so I'm thinking it's kernel related.

I really don't have a need for more than 8gb for a Linux install. I have heard mixed reviews for the cheap kingspec drives. Sure, I could afford to try one for 100 bucks or whatever, but I got the CF going for less than that. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and so far it seems completely stable. I have about 5 gigs free out of the 8 gigs on the card, and I haven't removed all the unnecessary programs yet. I bought this tablet without a hard drive in it in the first place, so it's been a positive experience overall so far. Also hdparm tells me I'm getting about 38MBs per second transfer speeds.

Can I ask why are you bothering with all that upgrading headaches, why dont you just fresh install 9.10? It takes like 10 minutes, and could be performed by a 10 year old!

Where exactly have you heard "mixed reviews" for the Kingspecs? I have only heard success and positive talk with them, and I can vouch myself for how great they are. Idk why anyone would be trying any other drive. I wouldnt really call them cheap either, theyre good quality drives!

I just think CF cards are so outdated in 2010, 8gb surely is too small for anyone to seriously consider using them. If you cant afford £60 for a SSD, just use a regular HDD, I cant see the point in going to the trouble of trying to get a CF card to work, for negligible improvement and such a down grade in disk space. I know alot of people like to dual boot, and have linux and windows on their Thinkpads, this simply isnt possible with CF cards!

As stated, the laptop didn't come with a hard drive. What is the point of buying a 4200rpm drive for almost as much as the adapter+cf card, just to get that extra 12 or 32gb of space, along with slower speeds? The laptop is only being used for web and office applications. And as stated, it's plenty fast and stable with Ubuntu 9.04, while only taking up 3gb of space.

I tried multiple fresh installs of Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12, as I stated in my post. They all failed. Starting with Ubuntu 8.04 and chain upgrading up to 9.10 also failed, but only when it got to 9.10. So that's why I went with a fresh install of 9.04. And that's why I think that the new kernels have something new going on with regards to CF compatibility.

Just because the kingspec drive is working well for you doesn't mean that lots of other people aren't having problems with getting different operating systems to recognize them. I didn't want to spend twice the money just to take that risk. I've had mixed results with the after-market-china-fab game, and I really doubt they are going to be offering warranty support down the road. But who knows.

hmm yes well I havent managed to install XP on it yet, it keeps giving me the ntldr error, even though I have tried all the usual methods to resolve it, it kept giving me the error. I never thought this was a problem with the drive though. either way I gave up on Windows and im just running Ubuntu now.

But I miss windows and the X41 isnt able to run Aero on W7 so I may have to change laptops

9.04 -> 9.10 works great... when it works. Ubuntu's quality control can be a bit patchy, and unlike Debian, most admins I know don't trust dist-upgrade for anything but a 100% stock Ubuntu install.

I'd second your recommendation of a fresh install, but I'm not sure if I agree with the 10-year-old part... 9.10 had its share of problems when I tried it on my X60s. It cleverly installed GRUB onto the USB stick, resulting in a system that failed to boot after the install was complete. Easy to fix, sure, but a rather amateurish mistake to make.

Oh, and then there's the fun to be had the first time a JFS root partition requires checking -- the startup scripts seem to be oblivious to anything but EXT3/4, and don't know to wait for a mandatory JFS check. Since X requires write access to /tmp, and JFS will mount as read-only after a clean unmount, the first time you hard reboot your system you get dumped to text-mode while the GDM script repeatedly rams its head into the wall trying to bring up X. Fun times. Again, easy fix (one-line fix to a shell script), but not exactly the sort of fix you should have to make...



They use a JMicron controller. That's enough to disqualify them for me. YMMV though.



Depends on your usage. My primary machine -- the one loaded down with tons of development tools, source code, etc. is currently only using 7.5 GB of its root partition. My X40, which I use for casual surfing, IRC, etc. is only using about 1GB. 8GB can be plenty, depending on your needs.

The thing is though generally I would say the SSD is still only a "future" technology anyway, they may be bringing out 500gb ones now, but come on, they cost like $1,500! This is not the sort of hardware the average user need to be too worried about getting exactly right. If you want the finished article, then wait a few years.

I think we can all agree that our use of SSD's right now is "experimental" at best. No major manufacturer, even in netbooks, have really taken to SSD's yet as factory options, even though im sure in say 3-5 years, they will be factory norm.

Im just happy to be apart of the first wave of testers!

The slightly annoying thing though, is now that im used to the extreme silence of my SSD equipped x41, im currently looking to buy a 12inch netbook, and I know im going to annoying by its noisy hdd and slow response times.

I have 5 Sandisk 32GB SSDs and a number of 8GB-32GB CF cards running XP and Win7 in X40/X41 at home. CF cards running OS are not out dated.

We recently bought X200s' with Samsung SSDs at the office. SSD are not "future" or "experimental" technology and they are being offered by OEMs as factory options.


Sound like another seller post?

^lol i'm not a "seller", I was on here asking for advice myself, it was this very forum that told me to get the Kingspec!

Anyway I just installed W7, and did a Windows Experience index, check out the stats!



6.1 for the disc drive woo hoooO!!!!!! thats the highest ive ever had

I don't really think SSD is so experimental. I think that if you have the money for an SLC drive, especially from Intel, that it's going to have a failure rate similar to a standard magnetic drive. MLC, on the other hand, may never reach that level of reliability. If it doesn't, it won't be because its experimental or ahead of its time. It'll be because of the laws of physics.

That being the case, I would never really try to use MLC for any kind of long term storage. For this machine with the CF card, I want to write and store as little data as possible because increasing writes can decrease performance in the long term.

But for 60 or 75 bucks you can have the speed of SSD, plenty fast enough to run a whole host of office apps and do general web browsing. And that's pretty good!

Just pickup another 32GB RiDATA 233x CF card for $70. So far this is the fastest CF card I've tested. I think I will return the Patriot 266x card that is actually slower.

Has anyone tried the new Transcend 400x CF card?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

I think it came out about 2 to 3 months ago. At $66 shipped the 16GB seems like a reasonable deal.

Hey guys

I recently changed the hdd out my x40 which did have a super talent 1.3" ssd 16gb. The ssd flopped and i sent it for rma. Those guys are taking forever so in the mean while I bought a patriot 16gb cf card. It runs nice on win7 but I have 2 minor problems I want to see if I can resolve so I can get the most out of the card. One is sometimes not always the system does this freeze thing for a few seconds as its processing or something. and the other thing is I want the card to run in udma5 or 6. It says in the patriots specs it does those speeds but its stuck on udma2 as I can see in device manager. Anyway around this? I havent tweaked the system yet...I only turned off the indexing on the hdd and put win7 interface in basic mode.

thanks

I assure this is a 266x version Patriot CF card. I did get UDMA5 to work, see my post in the benchmark thread below. Nevertheless it is a pretty slow card. You may want to delete all the files on the card then do a Write "1111" to all free space first. I wrote a procedure in this thread a while ago. This will speed up the writes a lot.

What was the problem with your Super Talent SSD board? If it is an uncased board, the ZIF connector pinout should be reversed. It takes a revese cable to be used with an IDE-ZIF adapter.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0200114005

So basically you can't use the OEM style adapter with a fixed cable.

If you are using an IDE-ZIF adapter, you will need to bypass the 5V/3.3V regulator on the adapter.

Well the super talent was working until it just died! loll so i rma it as it has 2 yr warranty. I had it setup with zif--> ide with the reversed zif cable. I bought the patriot b/c i had a $25 gift card from amazon so I got it for like $20 i think. Ok I see what your saying but do u mind just pasting the direct link to ur threads. it'll be easier then searching around.

The Write "1111" instruction was posted on Oct 17th in this thread.

The Patriot card benchmark was in the last post in following thread:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=71881&start=60

Did you bypass the 3.3V regulator on the IDE-ZIF adapter so it can be used in your X40 since that HDD slot is 3.3V already?

I don't remeber by passing anything. i did install the 1.8 zif to ide upside down and it said 3.3v on the convertor. Was I suppost to by pass it? Maybe thats why sometimes I turned on the x40 the system wont detect the super talent until I turn off and turn the system back on. lol maybe thats wat fryed the super talent loll. Ok let me search again for your post.

I had bought something similar to this for the zif to ide

http://cgi.ebay.com/TOSHIBA-Hard-Drive-HDD-Zif-1-8-to-2-5-IDE-Adapter_W0QQitemZ310200960151QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_2?hash=item48396b0497

Yes, you need to bypass the regulator, that transistor looking thing, to work properly in a X4x. Here is a photo of how it looks:

Although regulator in the photo is rotated 90 degs from yours, the same legs should be shorted. Your Super Talent SSD should not be damaged, it is just not getting the right voltage.

Ok I see what your talking about. But What did u exactly do? (Shorted as short circuit, right?) Did u just kinda of disconnect the 3.3v regulator from its solder connection on the board or I see like some black ..kinda of burnt mark on 2 of the 3 solder connection points for that regulator. Ya maybe the super talent is not damaged, I guess I will find out when the rma returns to me.

Oh I went to the page with the patriot benchmark but I did not see anything about putting the patriot on to udma5 mode. Mine is currently stock in udma2 mode in win 7.

The "burnt" mark is really solder resin. I just soldered a jumper between the input and output pins on the 3.3V regulator. This will not damage the regulator and I can return it to the regulated mode later by removing the jumper for use in 5V IDE slots. Some folks remove the regulator before adding a jumper. But there is no need to do that.

Once you do the 3.3V mod to the adapter, never use it in a Ultrabay tray since the Ultrabay is 5V. I manage to fry an expensive 120GB Samsung drive this way.

I don't know of a way to change UDMA-2 to UDMA-5. I suggest you delate all the files on the Patriot CF card, run the Write "1111" routine on it, then reinstall OS.

Ok cool. I will try that out. crap I did not want to reinstall windows again. loll. The Eraser program I should run it in a seperate cf reader card on another pc? I have a multi cf reader on a amd athlon64 desktop I could use. What u mean never use it in the ultrabay tray? u mena the docking station?

Since a mod'ed adapter has the 3.3V regulator bypass, if you connected to any 5V slot, such as an Ultrabay, 5V will be applied to the connected device. If the device is a 1.8 inch HDD or SSD, then 5V may damage it.

if i dont use the ultrabay then how would i use my cdrom drive if I have to reinstall windows?

Here is a common way to clone a drive in a X4x:
HDD slot: new drive
Ultrabase/Ultrabay: old drive
USB CD drive: cloning software

I have a 32G-C Runcore in my X40 and the difference is astounding. 77MB/sec sustained read speed. It boots in under 30 seconds.

Personally I don't put much faith in sequential read speeds. It's the random writes/reads under load that I care about -- and last I checked, most of the drop-in non-SATA SSDs sucked at those.

How does the Runcore do on <= 4K random reads/writes?

anyone know if this ssd would work in an x41?

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/03/10/oc ... below-100/

guess i would still need some type of adapter, but the speed sounds better than the original hdd i have now. could make it the perfect netbook. (good thing too, as that's about all there is room for on the disk.)

The one in the picture? That won't work:

1- It's a SATA drive, you need PATA for the X4 series
2- It's a 2.5" drive, you need a 1.8" for the X4 series

Cheers

Do you guys put up with the hard drive boot warning or is there a way around that?

Never had any problems with HDD/SSDs that caused the warning. I don't reboot much, mostly standby so never hear the warning much.

My SSD is yet to be fitted so I'll let you know how I get on.