Using an SD card (or other flash storage) as a bootable drive?

[Slick5150]

I've seen devices like this (Link) that allow you to plug in an SD card and connect to an IDE port on the motherboard. I'd assume then the bios would just read this as any other IDE drive, which got me thinking if you could use an SD card as a bootable OS drive?

I'm looking to build a media center PC, and all of my media is stored on network drives so I really don't need much of any diskspace on the PC itself. So could I install XP MCE (or Linux, or whatever) onto an 8GB SD card and run it that way? (the obvious benefit being it would be silent).

I don't know if this would even work, but a couple concerns that jumped out to me would be 1) the reliability of an SD card. Do they tend to have a certain number of read/writes to them before they start to fail? 2) I don't really know the speed comparisons between a high speed SD card and a hard drive. Would the card be quick enough? 3) Is there some other reason why the computer would not like this device as the boot drive?

or 4) Is this just a stupid idea to begin with?

 

[Slick5150]

Anybody?

 

[jkresh]

speed for some things would be good (booting windows...), sd has good access times but poor read/write speed (though as a boot drive the access time is more important). Most regular sd cards are not designed for this so it might die after a year or two (ssd drives have specific hardware to help with this). You are probably better off getting a quit hard drive (also if you are more then a few feet away from the pc hard drive noise should not be an issue).