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Post by David Murray on Apr 16, 2007 10:01:31 GMT -5
cgi.ebay.com/NEW-IDE-HARD-DRIVE-TO-CF-COMPACT-FLASH-CONVERT-ADAPTER_W0QQitemZ300101432216QQihZ020QQcategoryZ41994QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItemI just bought two of these little beauties. I have also (for a totally different reason) bought a palette worth of little Compaq deskpro EN small-form-factor PCs ranging from 800 mhz to 1.0Ghz. all having 256 MB of RAM and the usual built-in stuff. However, they have no harddrives in them. But they were cheap (about $35 a piece) so I couldn't resist. Well, I got to thinking, after playing with some of these Linux Live CDs that a harddrive is actual optional equipment these days. I discovered there really wasn't anything I couldn't do on my PC while booted to the Live-CD except edit video.. which I could do because I have a harddrive, but if I didn't have one, that might be a problem. I suppose I could do it slowly over a network. still - anyway.. I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience running a computer without a harddrive. I also do not want to run from a Live-CD. In fact, I may remove the CDROM completely and use the space for something else. I had thought about running the machine from a USB stick, but these machines' BIOS are too old to boot directly to USB. So I figured an easy cure would be a small CF chip to boot from and run everything else from USB. Either that, or a larger CF chip to run everything from.. I realize I can't be using any swap space due to the nature of flash memory. But I doubt that will be much of a problem. One goal I have might be to use this unit as one of the computers in my shuttlecraft. I've already ordered a DC ATX power supply I'll be hacking into it. So the only noisemaker left would be the CPU-Fan, which I'm looking at ways of eliminating that and creating a flash-based Linux machine. I had thought about going with something like the I-Opener but it is just too darned slow and limited. I wanted at least one computer that could run a webbrowser and watch Divx Movies over the network and stuff.
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Post by Jim Brain on Apr 16, 2007 11:27:59 GMT -5
I did. I use a Flash-drive powered Linux box as a router and Wifi hotspot. There are a couple of issues:
Linux distros tend to update Last_accessed_date on any file used. This wears out the flash drive. Certain distros are set up for flassh operation, as they separate out the R/W and R/O parts of the OS and mount the R/O stuff as R/O, preventing the wear on the flash chips. They also turn off updating last accessed time, I think.
I use Metrix Linux for my box.
Jim
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Post by Leif Bloomquist on Apr 16, 2007 11:33:47 GMT -5
One of our embedded products at work booted off a compact flash card. We used Embedded NT to turn off the swap file and strip out most of the OS. Embedded NT even had a mode where it cached any writes to the disk to RAM so you never needed to write to the flash card at all. It worked fairly well.
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Post by gmoon on Apr 16, 2007 12:38:16 GMT -5
I've done it, too. I keep upgrading my CF cards as cameras increase resolution, so I have five CF cards, 256M to 1 Gig which aren't much use anymore....
I've used Linux, generally with a mechanical HD for swap & data. The PC I used didn't have enough memory (32M) to task memory as swap. Kind excludes a compressed approach, at least as is normally followed for live CDs. But embedded distributions can use considerably less.
I tried running it all from CF once, just to see how that worked. But of course I didn't want to burn up the CF-as-swap.
I have an IBM 1G CF interface (mechanical drive), and it doesn't have the memory write limitations of flash. Pretty slow, though. I doubt the tiny IBM drives would survive long if used as an OS drive.
You might look at both 'd**n small linux' and 'puppy linux.'
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Post by David Murray on Apr 16, 2007 13:01:41 GMT -5
Gmoon - I must be a mind reader. I'm actually over here just getting ready to boot a freshly burned Puppy-linux CD right as I'm reading your post. I noticed it actually has an option specifically to install to a USB drive or to a CF card.
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Post by plbyrd on Apr 16, 2007 14:53:31 GMT -5
I have an AMD K6-2 450mhz system running MS-DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 WFW that I use for 64HDD and star commander. This setup runs on a 128MB CF card I had laying around and it uses the CF IDE adapter to be the master drive of the system. I also have an over-sized heat sink on the CPU so no fan is needed there, and the AT-style power supply is fan-less too, so the whole system is totally silent except when the CD-ROM is working.
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Post by gmoon on Apr 16, 2007 20:49:00 GMT -5
Be interesting to hear the results--my tests all involved a motherboard with an Cyrix MediaGX processor (supposedly pentium-compatible, but only just.) Only a very few Linux distributions would even boot...Couldn't use what I really wanted.
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Post by racob on Apr 16, 2007 23:58:41 GMT -5
HI,
Just like David, I have one of the CF to IDE card that could take the place of the primary HD on my PC...I was planning to assemble an embedded XP (oops!)...it has worked, then I moved to memory sticks as 'Windows on a USB stick' project...my enthusiasm did not stay long...after I was able to boot from it...my interest moved into bootable USB disk. I have one that is bootable with MiniPE which I carry as troubleshooting tool in the "GATES" world..
However, I retrieved a few DISKLESS (circa 2000) MAVRIC WIRELESS communication boxes. I found out that in place of the floppies, it used a 1MB flash chip by M Systems. When the company started throwing them out, I alomt took them all just because of the board...all I did was took out the apps and put my own MS-DOS and small apps...I was wanting to use it for 64HDD but opted for a laptop instead (due to space problems on my table).
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Post by thurstan on Apr 17, 2007 5:06:02 GMT -5
You hear all the time about wearing out flash memory, limited number of read/writes etc.
Has anyone experienced or heard of someone actually wearing out their flash drive/card/memory?!
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Post by David Murray on Apr 17, 2007 8:35:30 GMT -5
assemble an embedded XP (oops!)...it has worked, then I moved to memory sticks as 'Windows on a USB stick' project...my enthusiasm did not stay long...after I was able to boot from Racob.. I might be using a USB stick. Only problem is the machine in question is a 1 Ghz Pentium III and the BIOS won't boot from USB. I found out that with puppy-linux you can overcome this by using a boot floppy and a USB stick. However, I figured while elimiating the harddrive, I might as well elminate other moving parts too. so the floppy is going to go away. So I need something to boot from. The only CF card I even own is an 8 MB. Can't fit much on that. But hopefully enough to make it boot the kernal and then load the rest from USB.. However, I think the CF would have faster read access than a USB stick, especially considering this machine has USB 1.1 only. So I think the CF would be the way to go in the long run. Yes.. I've played with one of those. It was an ISA card that had 4 MB of flash on it and its own BIOS so that computer could boot to it like a harddrive. You know, it is funny, I've always wanted to take an embedded system and turn it into a desktop. Now I'm about to do the opposite. Still, one of the things I really HATE about the modern Win-tel boxes is how HUGE and NOISY they are. Some geeks actually think the more fans they have inside their computer is a status symbol of how fast and awesome it must be. Some sound like airplanes. I have a friends computer over right now that I'm repairing for him. It is just a regular ATX tower, but it is so much larger than my Compaq EVO and so much wasted space inside. I can also hear the fans from the other side of the house. To be honest, this CF thing is an experiment for my shuttlecraft project, but it is also dual purpose. I may end up converting some other computers around the house to flash-only if it works well. Most of the computers around here do not need a lot of storage, mostly because I have a server in a closet which has a lot of storage for personal files.
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Post by racob on Apr 17, 2007 11:35:05 GMT -5
Hello again:
1. Thurstan:..that talk about having only few writes (a limitation on these devices) made me cool off on having a portable WinXP...people say about it but I haven't experienced one yet..
2. David:...I agree with you with all these "noise" issues...can't stand them. Anyway, I have a couple of MINI-ITX systems using Via boards....and I also used a dc-to-dc PSU so I can use an adapters...these systems are totally almost noiseless especially if you have a fanless cpu. They are not the fastest pc's but good enough for some other purposes. This is where I had my CF-IDE drive...so it is almost noiseless except for my cd drive.. I got most of the info from mini-itx.com site...
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Post by David Murray on Apr 20, 2007 21:29:01 GMT -5
Well..I've answered my own question now. I finally got my adapter and I bought a 1.0GB CF card for $24. I installed puppy-linux to the card and I am now currently using the computer in question having booted from that card. It is the most unusual thing being that I have the computer sitting right here in front of me as I use it, but there is no sound of a harddrive grinding or a CDROM spinning away. There is a small amount of fan noise, which is actually very low for this type of computer. What makes it more strange is seeing the hard-disk activity light flashing but hearing no sound to go along with it. It sort of reminds me of the strange feeling I got the first time I drove my Toyota Prius around and didn't hear the sound of the engine running. Something just didn't seem right, and it is the same here. Still, it is a good thing. And there is plenty of space left over on the drive after installing Puppy.
Still.. I'll be honest, Puppy linux is nice, but I much prefer dreamlinux. I'm going to have to look into getting it installed in a "flash memory friendly" fashion. Swap is easy, just don't make a swap partition or file. The "last access" attribute, I'm not sure how to deal with.
Oh.. one last thing. What is a good method to compare the speed of this CF card with a harddrive? Bootup time seems very fast, but as I look at the IDE activity light, it isn't even going during most of the boot time. So I think boot time is mostly constrained by startup activities. So I don't think that is a good test.
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