Compact Flash OS

[JAC]

The thread about whats under your hood reminded me of something I saw a while back. That was running your pc off a compact flash card - usnig an IDE - Compact Flash adaptor. Has anyone tried this?

http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/forums/showthread.php?t=425

[Cpuswe]

I have a colleague at work running two 4 Gb Compact Flash cards as a boot disk on his HTPC. Very silent but perhaps not as fast since the adapters only supports PIO and not DMA. Adapters supporting DMA is comming available or already has.

[JoelTheGeek]

I've been toying with the idea of picking one up & running TrixBox off of it. I have a TrixBox PBX running now, but since it's not too active then the hard drive barely does a thing except chew up hydro.

[Marcin]

Flash memory have much smaller limit of read-write operations than standard HDD. That means it will damage much faster and you will loss (I hope not) important data. I didn't try it ...

[Cpuswe]

True, they are not for storing important data but as a boot disk i would say its perfect. Cheap,cool and silent.

[D.8080]

Sounds cool, flash for boot is perfect, but no emuleing.

Anyone tried the ram disk?



If I'm not wrong some epia motherboards have a built in flash slot.

[Marcin]

Most of motherboards have boot option : Removable or USB HDD (different names in BIOS but same function) and you can use any pendrive as boot disk IDE connector is faster than USB 2.0 standard but we are using same slow flash memory.

Anyway very good idea. I like unusual items like adapters

[doccybrown]

My Amiga 600 with integrated IDE-interface
is already loading the OS from a CF-card.
Veeeeery fast, desktop is available in a few seconds!
Also a big advantage is that the flashcards
aren`t huffy like harddisks if dropped....

[D.8080]

You can tell!

[doccybrown]

Many newer small client workstations
already using cf-cards as boot device
by default. Newer cards are
delivering more than 10MB/s...
at a few times lower random access time
in comparison with a harddisk!

[doccybrown]

Not to forget the low power consumption of
cf-cards. I think they are very cool for laptops,
low power consumption and shock resistant.

[D.8080]

When I look back to 5 years ago...
Now all this is normal stuff.

[doccybrown]

I guess first flash-devices appeared
about ten years ago so you are
right this is old stuff. But meanwhile they are
improved in capacity, speed and durability.
So HDs are getting more and more serious
competition by CF-cards and SSDs!

[wepwawet]

five years ago...
hm.
I remember me building a fli4l ISDN firewall/router out of a Siemens 5l PC, a very small pc that worked wirhout any fan and had a power consumption of 17 W without a hard disk.
I had anything ready, OS on a diskette and wanted to use a flash memory instead (that machine was known as a diskette melter - those low 17 W were enough to melt down a diskette within some weeks when the machine was turned on all the time and the diskete wasn't removed:-).
As I didn't find the right controller card, firewall software begun to be reliable on the workstation and the DLS discussion started i left that project.

... maybe worth start thinking again. why not?

[Wizzard1]

OS on a flash-disk are preferable when lightweight/low-power/durability are a preference- I have 2 laptops running on flash (one CF and the other ISE-flash) and they boot Win98se extremely quicky... I would not recommend them for XP, unless you have >1GB RAM as the pagefile would need to be OFF.