booting from flash devices

[stevf]

Hello - looking to research using a flash device as a boot disk - anyone have any good sites to check into about doing this?


Thanks

 

[widefault]

There's some pretty basic info out there, but nothing that helpful. I've been working with flash setups for a while, what kind of info are you looking for?

 

[stevf]

Think I found what I was looking for - basically looking for a silent e-mail/surfing box and was thinking of using some sort of 4-8gb(or bigger based on price) flash device to use as the boot disk. I found ide to CF converters which would do what I want. Are you aware of any SD type(or the type that has a write lock on it) converters that would sit inside the case?

 

[widefault]

This is the only SD to IDE adapter I've seen, but I haven't looked much. Prefer Compact Flash

 

[stevf]

thanks - Only reason for thinking about SD is write protecting boot disk, but was leaning to CF anyways - do you have a preference for a certain cd adapter? or a reliable merchant that carries them. Also, do you know if any of the mini/nano-itx boards have a cf slot built in?

 

[VinDSL]

Impossible!

 

[stevf]

ok - so i have a few different styles of flash devices that do what I am imaging. Some are a card that attaches via cable or directly to the ide port then on the card you put a cf card. Another type is a small module that goes directly on the ide port and has built in memory so it is about the size of the ide plug and a usb thumb drive put together(if that makes sense).

Anyone have any experience with these they care to share?

also - anyone have any experience with this card?? Looks very interesting

http://www.addonics.com/produc...ry_reader/ad4cfprj.asp

 

[widefault]

Heh, playing with the QuadCF right now. So far I'm having a hard time finding flash cards it likes. A-Data cards don't work, it doesn't always see them on bootup. I have one other card that works fine, but so far I can't get it to work with a single CF card. Waiting for more cards to do more testing. I did get it working with 4x4GB A-Data, but it was not bootable with those cards. Speeds are PCI limited, and don't get better with more than two cards. It's basically an IDE RAID card with CF slots. Still with 2x4GB cards in RAID it managed ~60MB/s, 58MB/s with four in RAID.

I prefer using the CF-IDE adapter types, easier to swap in another card for more space or better performance.

No real preference in the CF-IDE adapters, they're all pretty much the same. All they do is convert the connector, CF-ATA cards have a built-in IDE interface.

Quite a few mini-ITX boards have CF slots, but I'm not sure if any of the Via-built boards do. I usually see them as an option on the boards from the embedded manufacturers(Kontron, Commell, Ibase, Itox...)

 

[stevf]

do you know on that board if you can have one slot be a single drive boot drive and then use the other 3 in raid? or 2 raids each using 2 slots?

 

[widefault]

I don't think you can do one card for boot, others in RAID. With the flash cards I have, I haven't been able to install XP successfully with only one card. Haven't tried anything else, since my goal is to get an XP system running.

You can do 2 RAID arrays, but that will screw performance up quite a bit. Since it uses a 2 port IDE RAID chipset, two of the cards are sharing each port.