Boot from Compact Flash

[LiamC]

Seen by OS as IDE device. Bootable.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32070

 

[Mercutio]

Isn't the minimum size of an XP install slightly over 4GB to begin with? I mean, my Prepped disk images are usually about 3.8GB with XP + Office + Drivers, and those are compressed.

I know I can shoehorn a decent Linux install on a 256MB thumb drive, but the first thing I thought of was silent computing for the truly hardcore. I guess that would take an 8GB card, though.

 

[ddrueding]

I've been doing this on my Smoothwall boxes for about 6 months. The hardware is readily avialable at newegg for about $10.

 

[Sol]

The article seems to suggest tat this might be an alternative to a ubs card reader for an OS which lacks appropriate drivers... Given that such an OS would have to be pretty obscure and that you lose hot-swapability I don't really see it's advantage over the more common internal units for too many applications...

 

[LiamC]

I've been doing this on my Smoothwall boxes for about 6 months. The hardware is readily avialable at newegg for about $10.

I thought I'd seen mention of such a device here before, but couldn't find the reference.

 

[Stereodude]

Just FYI, Windows XP doesn't like CF cards that aren't "fixed disk" very much.

 

[ddrueding]

Just for fun, I took one of my Smoothwall boxes and installed XP SP2 on it. Here's the specs:

VIA 600Mhz Fanless CPU
256MB RAM
1GB CF Card on IDE adapter
PicoPSU 60W power supply

Running fine. I did run the XPLite demo mode to clean some stuff up, but I have XP Pro, Latest Firefox, and Media Player Classic installed with plenty (60MB) free. It actually isn't nearly as slow as I was afraid of; I think it would make a fine TS client. I don't think it'll hold it's own as a HTPC though.

 

[Mercutio]

Nope, but that little guy would be dandy as a small web or print server.
Or for that matter a file server.

Over the weekend I'm hoping to start my wooden ITX PC project. I have a $30 put-together cabinet that I'm going to mount a Via system in. I'll be installing Linux (SuSE 10, probably) and attaching drives with USB2-to-IDE and Firewire-to-IDE bridges. The drives will run (for now) off an AT PSU.

 

[ddrueding]

Interesting, I'd be interested to see if the IO on the motherboard is even capable of sustaining solid transfer rates. I'm spoiled, I have GbE everywhere...

 

[ddrueding]

This is quite useable as long as you follow two simple rules:

1. Don't be in a hurry
2. DO NOT MULTITASK

In other words; slow, but completely functional. I'll be trying some XviD mivies soon :eekers:

 

[Mercutio]

I know my crappy C3 can saturate 100mbit Ethernet just fine, and can deliver enough data to play back two high bitrate xvid files simultaneously on different clients.

I plan to drill holes in my cheap cabinet to mount an ITX or uATX motherboard. If the C3 can't cut it, I'll probably put in a PentiumM or Turion or Core Solo something or other.

I want to take down two of my four file servers. That's the goal. That will mean building one machine that's capable of dealing with with something like 4TB of data, one way or another. Since I very seldom use the fast CPUs in those servers any more (they're A64/3000s), I'd like to replace them with something that generates a minimum of heat.

 

[ddrueding]

I know my crappy C3 can saturate 100mbit Ethernet just fine, and can deliver enough data to play back two high bitrate xvid files simultaneously on different clients.

I plan to drill holes in my cheap cabinet to mount an ITX or uATX motherboard. If the C3 can't cut it, I'll probably put in a PentiumM or Turion or Core Solo something or other.

I want to take down two of my four file servers. That's the goal. That will mean building one machine that's capable of dealing with with something like 4TB of data, one way or another. Since I very seldom use the fast CPUs in those servers any more (they're A64/3000s), I'd like to replace them with something that generates a minimum of heat.

I was actually thinking of killing off some of my fileservers as well. With 500GB and 750GB drives readily available, 4TB is less than 6 disks. I just can't remember how big a single JBOD array can be in 32-bit windows server 2003.

 

[ddrueding]

For the record; XviD video on this hardware? Sure!*

* @2FPS with choppy audio

 

[ddrueding]

Nevermind about the XP install on 1GB either; it "windows updated" itself out of disk space...what a POS

 

[Mercutio]

ddrueding, I'm not PLAYING the file on the C3. It's just the fileserver that happens to have the video file one of my other PCs is playing. Since it can manage flawlessly deliver two such video files over a plain 100mbit connection, it'll probably do for my needs.

 

[Mercutio]

Windows supports JBODs of up to 32 volumes, totalling not more than whatever arbitrarily huge size NTFS supports (256TB, I think).

Most hardware RAID controllers (including 3ware) on 32 bit hardware choke on arrays larger than 2TB. I'm not sure if that's a limitation of 32-bit CPU architectures or just 32-bit PCI. Probably PCI.

 

[ddrueding]

Windows supports JBODs of up to 32 volumes, totalling not more than whatever arbitrarily huge size NTFS supports (256TB, I think).

Most hardware RAID controllers (including 3ware) on 32 bit hardware choke on arrays larger than 2TB. I'm not sure if that's a limitation of 32-bit CPU architectures or just 32-bit PCI. Probably PCI.

Thanks. I remember volume limitations on the 3Ware cards, good to hear software doesn't have that issue.

 

[ddrueding]

Thinking about these for my media boxes.

Much slower than even my 2.5" 5400RPM drives, but silent and very low power requirements. Does anyone see a problem using these to launch winamp and media player classic?

 

[LunarMist]

Maybe you can run several cards in RAID 0.

 

[CougTek]

Thinking about these for my media boxes.

Yeah, put your swap file on it and see how quickly you can waste 180$.

 

[CougTek]

Are 2.5" drives THAT noisy to you? And they dissipated less than 5W IIRC. 120GB models are fairly cheap and they don't have a smallish write countdown death clock. IMO, flash memory is best left to portable stockage devices like USB memory keys, not internal devices that are constantly powered-on.

 

[ddrueding]

2.5" drives are the noisiest thing in my computers, and I don't consider the write count an issue. The number of cycles is pretty high these days and I never keep a system around for more than a year or so.

 

[LOST6200]

So are the Cf cards gauranteed for a fixed nuber of cyles? I think not. The manufacturer will probbbly honors the warranty - at least on the first go arounds.