After recently trying an IDE to SATA adapter for the first time, I decided to do some testing on performance of various CompactFlash cards in an IDE to CF adapter versus a Kingston SA400S37/120G SATA SSD connected with the StarTech IDE2SAT2 adapter. I know many memory cards are optimized for large bulk operations over small random writes, but I was also concerned that IDE to SATA adapters might have performance issues of their own since they must do a lot of heavy lifting to convert between protocols.
I tried to find a good Mac OS 9 app to get disk benchmarks but I couldn't find anything that gave the data I needed, so I settled for Xbench, which offers a disk benchmark very similar to CrystalDiskMark on Windows. After installing and updating Panther on the SSD so I could boot from that on the iMac to run the test, I also ended up doing most of the tests on my Mac mini with a USB to IDE adapter (and an IDE to CF adapter connected to that).
Storage Device | Test Computer | Device Interface | OS X | Sequential 4K Write | Sequential 256K Write | Sequential 4K Read | Sequential 256K Read | Random 4K Write | Random 256K Write | Random 4K Read | Random 256K Read |
SanDisk Extreme 64GB CF | iMac G3 600MHz | Internal IDE | 10.4 | 7.71 MB/sec | 27.82 MB/sec | 7.60 MB/sec | 28.96 MB/sec | 0.94 MB/sec | 20.78 MB/sec | 5.98 MB/sec | 28.44 MB/sec |
Kingston A400 SATA SSD | iMac G3 600MHz | Internal IDE | 10.3 | 16.05 MB/sec | 25.61 MB/sec | 8.58 MB/sec | 29.42 MB/sec | 12.61 MB/sec | 26.38 MB/sec | 8.17 MB/sec | 28.62 MB/sec |
Verbatim 4GB CF | Mac mini (Intel) | USB 2.0 IDE adapter | 10.6 | 6.43 MB/sec | 6.16 MB/sec | 5.19 MB/sec | 18.99 MB/sec | 0.01 MB/sec | 0.52 MB/sec | 4.99 MB/sec | 18.48 MB/sec |
Verbatim 16GB Premium CF | Mac mini (Intel) | USB 2.0 IDE adapter | 10.6 | 19.80 MB/sec | 18.41 MB/sec | 6.44 MB/sec | 30.52 MB/sec | 0.02 MB/sec | 0.79 MB/sec | 4.04 MB/sec | 29.40 MB/sec |
Delkin Devices Select 8GB CF | Mac mini (Intel) | USB 2.0 IDE adapter | 10.6 | 24.07 MB/sec | 21.74 MB/sec | 6.14 MB/sec | 31.17 MB/sec | 0.01 MB/sec | 0.49 MB/sec | 2.88 MB/sec | 29.37 MB/sec |
SanDisk Ultra 16GB CF | Mac mini (Intel) | USB 2.0 IDE adapter | 10.6 | 25.15 MB/sec | 21.92 MB/sec | 7.59 MB/sec | 32.31 MB/sec | 1.56 MB/sec | 14.34 MB/sec | 5.78 MB/sec | 31.81 MB/sec |
PowerBook G3 PDQ HDD | Mac mini (Intel) | USB 2.0 IDE adapter | 10.6 | 6.42 MB/sec | 5.85 MB/sec | 7.46 MB/sec | 7.85 MB/sec | 0.26 MB/sec | 3.92 MB/sec | 0.27 MB/sec | 5.46 MB/sec |
320GB SATA HDD | Mac mini (Intel) | Internal SATA | 10.6 | 71.00 MB/sec | 63.89 MB/sec | 20.92 MB/sec | 67.51 MB/sec | 1.25 MB/sec | 31.86 MB/sec | 0.47 MB/sec | 21.57 MB/sec |
As you can see, I also benchmarked some spinning hard drives for comparison. Ultimately, I'm not sure if 4K random write actually matters in real-world use, but wow, most CF cards are absolutely terrible at it. The non-SanDisk cards didn't come close to meeting the random 4K performance of even the ancient 4GB IBM Travelstar hard drive I pulled from my PowerBook G3 PDQ.
Ultimately, I will be sticking with the SanDisk Extreme 64GB card I was already using in my iMac G3, and I'll be putting my 16GB SanDisk card in the PDQ. I wouldn't recommend buying any of the other CF cards I tested for use as boot disks, simply based on their random write performance. If I were starting from scratch on my iMac I would probably use the IDE to SATA adapter instead of a CompactFlash card, but I'm using that adapter in a different Mac and the SanDisk Extreme card is still much faster than a hard drive of the era.
In short, I highly recommend the StarTech IDE to SATA adapter. Paired with a cheap SSD it is an extremely fast option for only about $40 total including the SSD. For a laptop, I haven't tried any mSATA to IDE adapters (I expect they perform well), but a good SanDisk card will work quite well.