modify a firestore to accept CF cards?

[Hunter Richards]

I have heard of people modifying firestores to add 3rd party harddrives (outside of the box) for longer record times but is it possible to change out the hard drive for a CF card slot?:

I know there are ide and other harddrive cable to cf card adapters. Would it be possible to remove the harddrive in a firestore, add the ide (or whatever) cable to CF card adapter and record strait onto Compact flash?

Thanks,

Hunter

Here are some links:

Dual & single IDE CF card adapter: http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...ad44midecf.asp

[Giroud Francois]

the problem is CF card are usually too slow.(30Mbit/sec sustained for DV)
you will need a high capacity and high speed CF card.
(speed unit for memory card is 150Kbits/sec, so 30Mbit/s=200x speed)
unfortunately, for these cards, the biggest, the slowest, so hard to find item.
they are very expensive, and you will need several of them.(to match the capacity of a cheap hard disk)
the cost of a huge 2.5 drive is unbeatable, so you will better have to upgrade to a bigger drive.
If you really need to go to solid state, the new SSD disks would be a better alternative.\only problem , DDS drives are very expensive too...
if your point is to get removable drives from a firestore, harddisk is still the best guess.
if your point is to go solidstate, you can try CF card if you are ok with small capacity (8 gig ? = 40 min of DV/HDV)
other cards (SD) could be a solution
http://www.zentek.com/product_sd_mdrv.htm

[Hunter Richards]

I think you are getting your Mb's and MB's mixed up, Most newer CF cards support 30MB/s sustained (MEGABYTES) which is way more than enough for 19.7Mbits/s (about 2.5 MegaBytes per second) from the JVC. Also the Red1 camera can record 36MEGABYTES/s to fast CF cards.

So thats not the issue, I am just wondering ifthe CF actually mount to the firestore as a "drive"?

[Giroud Francois]

you are right. unit for memory card is in KByte.
so 1x speed =150Kbyte and DV is 3.6Mbytes/sec.
So in theory a 24x speed card would be ok.
practically, even some card rated 133x have been proven unable to record reliably DV stream (on the new CF card recorder from Sony).
there is no doubt a complact flash to IDE would work, while is still to be demonstrated that it has some economic/technical advantage over cheap/fast/high capacity hard disks.

[Samuel Hinterlang]

Make sure that you get a flash card that meets the same ata pio mode specs as the hdd in the firestore and it should technically work. CF cards with adapters work as boot disks without a hitch so what would the real difference be. If they talk ata they must be ata to a device.

That's my guess

You might get more help on this topic over in the tapeless solutions thread though.

[Bryan Olinger]

It was interesting to run into this thread today.
My colleague and I just tested this modification earlier this day and it worked flawlessly. Not only did it work but the card sped up the load time and playback recall time on our DR-HD100.
The next step is to mod the housing for easy access to the cards.

Bryan Olinger
TriLight Productions, LLC
Columbus, Ohio USA

[Hunter Richards]

I bet if you modified the firestore used with dvcprohd camera, to accept solidstate CF cards, there would be a very high demand for them.