A buddy and I had a crack at making a SATA to CF adapter over the weekend. The technology is nothing special and adapters to use CF cards as SATA drives already exist, but until now I guess nobody's had reason to want one going the other way.
For the purposes of the test we hard wired our adapter to a Lexar USB 3.0 reader, since this was a DYI job and we couldn't make the adapter small enough to fit into a CF slot, and I didn't feel like hard wiring it to my 5d
. The important part is that the OCZ Agility SSD we had for the test benchmarked at exactly the same speed as when it was connected via the SATA cable(around 200MB/s write speed).
While this is as far as the actual test went, yesterday I broke out my mad design skills (not really) and designed a box that screws into the bottom of the camera like a battery grip and holds an SSD and a big enough battery to keep it going for at least 2 hours(around 6000mAh). Then I got my buddy to design the actual adapter so that it fits into a CF card body(that's sorta what he does for a living) that connects to the SSD box via a SATA cable and we've got a complete solution that record as fast as the 5d can write to a cheap-ish(cheaper than CF X1000 cards)memory.
We can't actually manufacture this our self so we contacted some manufacturers to get prices and I was just wondering if you guys are generally interested in that sort of a device. We're probably going to have to order at least 200, so I was thinking that if there's interest maybe I can start a kickstarter project. Obviously, the more we order the cheaper they are going to be so I was even thinking that if we can get a lot of orders we can donate some of the money to Magic Lantern guy to continue doing their magic
.
Anyway, I just wanted to get your thoughts on the subject. I will have some renders of the design in a day or two, and I'll also update you on potential price as soon as we get one.
For the purposes of the test we hard wired our adapter to a Lexar USB 3.0 reader, since this was a DYI job and we couldn't make the adapter small enough to fit into a CF slot, and I didn't feel like hard wiring it to my 5d
. The important part is that the OCZ Agility SSD we had for the test benchmarked at exactly the same speed as when it was connected via the SATA cable(around 200MB/s write speed).While this is as far as the actual test went, yesterday I broke out my mad design skills (not really) and designed a box that screws into the bottom of the camera like a battery grip and holds an SSD and a big enough battery to keep it going for at least 2 hours(around 6000mAh). Then I got my buddy to design the actual adapter so that it fits into a CF card body(that's sorta what he does for a living) that connects to the SSD box via a SATA cable and we've got a complete solution that record as fast as the 5d can write to a cheap-ish(cheaper than CF X1000 cards)memory.
We can't actually manufacture this our self so we contacted some manufacturers to get prices and I was just wondering if you guys are generally interested in that sort of a device. We're probably going to have to order at least 200, so I was thinking that if there's interest maybe I can start a kickstarter project. Obviously, the more we order the cheaper they are going to be so I was even thinking that if we can get a lot of orders we can donate some of the money to Magic Lantern guy to continue doing their magic
.Anyway, I just wanted to get your thoughts on the subject. I will have some renders of the design in a day or two, and I'll also update you on potential price as soon as we get one.