Compact Flash as IDE HDD

  • Thread starter Thread starter W.Wallace
  • Start date Start date
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W.Wallace

Hy to all,
I need to mount on an industrial PC a compact flash as an IDE Hard
Disk Drive, so I have to boot from it (because there is no Hard disk).
Can you please suggest me the CF and CF Card Type and the OS for this
purpose ?
Thanks to all in advance.
 
W.Wallace said:
Hy to all,
I need to mount on an industrial PC a compact flash as an IDE Hard
Disk Drive, so I have to boot from it (because there is no Hard disk).
Can you please suggest me the CF and CF Card Type and the OS for this
purpose ?
Click to expand...
Currently I'm experimenting with CF cards as HDDs and came across 2
problems. One is the capacity and the other lifetime. You can install Win98
onto 512MB CF and Win2k onto 1GB. What is really required is embedded OS.
However, Windows embedded requires hefty initial investment as the
development system is several thousand USD, but, there are now several
embedded Linux distros that I would like to try.
The lifetime problem stems from limited number of erase cycles that flash
RAM will tolerate. Currently its around 100k but a swap file can get written
to 100 to 1000 times a day so the life would be less than a year. A modified
embedded OS can be configured not to require swap file so that's really the
way to go.
 
Alien said:
Currently I'm experimenting with CF cards as HDDs and came across 2
problems. One is the capacity and the other lifetime. You can install
Win98 onto 512MB CF and Win2k onto 1GB. What is really required is
embedded OS. However, Windows embedded requires hefty initial
investment as the development system is several thousand USD, but,
there are now several embedded Linux distros that I would like to try.
The lifetime problem stems from limited number of erase cycles that
flash RAM will tolerate. Currently its around 100k but a swap file
can get written to 100 to 1000 times a day so the life would be less
than a year. A modified embedded OS can be configured not to require
swap file so that's really the way to go.
Click to expand...

A normal Windows OS can also be configured to not use a swapfile, as long as
you have enough RAM for the required usage.
 
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