Russell's Blog

The Hitachi 1.8" hard drive in the IBM X40 is probably the worst data storage product I've ever used. It is expensive, excruciatingly slow, irritatingly loud, and non-standard. There are basically no options for replacement except to just buy another one. And, as I discovered to my sorrow, it is also fragile and unreliable. So, I decided to replace it with a Compact Flash card.

You may have heard something about Solid State Drives (SSDs), such as the one available as an option for Apple's MacBook Air. You can think of this project as sort of a poor-man's version of these products.

While most CF drives are relatively small and expensive, there are a few products that seem to sacrifice speed for capacity. This may seem sub-optimal, but the drive it will be replacing is astonishingly slow to begin with. According to hdparm, it can do buffered reads at 18 MB/sec, but in practice that seems pretty optimistic.

If I understand correctly, the Compact Flash interconnect standard is basically a subset of IDE. So, you just need a little passive adapter board, and you can plug a CF card directly into an IDE port. I used a D44MIDECF adapter card from Addonics. At $20, it's a little overpriced. There are no active components, and the board contains only the CF plug, the 44 pin IDE pinout, a jumper, a surface mount resistor, a surface mount capacitor, and a surface mount LED. On the other hand, it is something of a specialty part, so I suppose I should be happy that they bothered to sell it to me at all. For the CF card, I found this monster on NewEgg.

The X40 doesn't have removable media (other than the SD/MMC reader). I've always hated fiddling around with boot floppies and installers anyway. Supposedly, Debian has gotten their installer in better shape since I last played with it. That was more than five years ago. I just skipped that whole process, and built out a minimal Debian install by hand. I popped the CF disk into my SanDisk USB Flash reader, and did the following :

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc 
   # created a 31 GB primary partition tagged as Linux [id 83]
   # and a 1 GB primary partition tagged as Linux Swap [id 82]
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdc1
sudo mkswap /dev/sdc2
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/flash
sudo debootstrap sid /mnt/flash/ http://linux.csua.berkeley.edu/debian
sudo chroot /mnt/flash
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install linux-image-2.6.24-1-686 grub sudo 
mkdir /boot/grub
update-grub
vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
exit
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/flash --recheck /dev/sdc

Then, pop the CF card in its little adapter board into the drive bay, and boot. Hooray! Here is how hdparm identifies the CF disk :

/dev/hda:

 Model=, FwRev=20070912, SerialNo=CF CARD 000040D9
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
 RawCHS=16383/15/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=576, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=DualPort, BuffSize=1kB, MaxMultSect=1, MultSect=off
 CurCHS=16383/15/63, CurSects=15481935, LBA=yes, LBAsects=63438848
 IORDY=no, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 *mdma2 
 AdvancedPM=no

 * signifies the current active mode

The default IDE settings for the CF drive result in very slow performance, so some tuning is in order. I edited /etc/hdparm.conf accordingly :

/dev/hda {
        write_cache = on
        io32_support = 3
        dma = on
        lookahead = on
        interrupt_unmask = on
}

Here is the output of the script :

Setting parameters of disc:
/dev/hda:
 setting 32-bit IO_support flag to 3
 setting unmaskirq to 1 (on)
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 setting drive read-lookahead to 1 (on)
 setting drive write-caching to 1 (on)
 IO_support    =  3 (32-bit w/sync)
 unmaskirq     =  1 (on)
 using_dma     =  1 (on)
 look-ahead    = not supported
 write-caching = not supported
  /dev/hda.

The result is actually a little faster than the Hitachi hard drive :

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing cached reads:   1474 MB in  2.00 seconds = 737.30 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   44 MB in  3.13 seconds =  14.06 MB/sec

So far, I'm pretty happy.