Compact Flash Write Speeds

[Zelgiusthebrave]

Hello ladies n gents, I come to you today with a question, this may be a little difficult to explain so please bear with me.

 

The company I work for is a radio network distributor and I work in the engineering department. Most of what I do is maintain our satellite up-links, feeds, hardware, game-site crew connections, etc. We deal with mostly college sports, news, and agriculture so we have a large standing nationwide.

 

Our older system called the International Communication Products Digiceiver is a quite old satellite receiver that makes up the bulk of our fleet currently. As old as they are they still do everything we need them to but their age makes them harder to find parts for to fix and its especially fun since the company ICP went out of business a fews years ago. So until we have the ability to upgrade the hundreds of stations in our fleet to the newer system called XDS, which we are still trying to learn how to use, we have to keep repairing the Digiceivers. The current issue is they use an IDE system for the hard drive. We have since quit using actual hard drives in them and moved to a Compact Flash to IDE setup, which works great but only has one issue.

 

The Digiceiver units can only handle a set write speed to the Compact Flash, meaning if the CF has a write speed that the Digi cannot handle it won't work and we cannot do anything with the unit. In the past this wasn't an issue now we are having trouble finding ones that do work.

 

For example, we bought a Kingston CF4GB in the past and it worked great, but when buying the same serial number they come to us as a different CF now, its still the CF4GB but there is a few numbers/letters on the back that are different and we found that the read/write speeds are higher. Read speeds don't matter as it's the write speeds that will not allow us to use newer Compact Flash drives.

 

Here is my question, is there a way to lower the write speeds of the Compact Flash? If there is I would love to know how but to be honest my hopes are not high. I should also mention the Digi's use a FAT16 system that we cannot change if it means anything.

 

If I need to clear anything up feel free to leave feedback and I look forward to hearing your answers soon.

[EposVox]

Well this is a really odd issue - write speeds aren't hardwired/set in stone, nor are they ever consistent. If something can only handle certain write speeds, it should simply be outputting only that write speed. Faster medium should never be a problem. (Just because my SSD has faster write speeds than my internet can download doesn't mean it can't download.)

So it sounds like bad coding.

Best of luck.

[Zelgiusthebrave]

Well this is a really odd issue - write speeds aren't hardwired/set in stone, nor are they ever consistent. If something can only handle certain write speeds, it should simply be outputting only that write speed. Faster medium should never be a problem. (Just because my SSD has faster write speeds than my internet can download doesn't mean it can't download.)

So it sounds like bad coding.

Best of luck.

See that's what I initially thought as well. Me and my co workers dug into this for over a month to try and figure out the exact reason some cards worked and others didn't and the best we could come up with is the write speeds. The problem being that when it sees the drive (which it has no problem with) it communicates with it but then locks the unit right up.