Compact Flash hard drives

[mlcampbe]

Has anyone built a cabinet and used a compact flash memory card as a hard drive? Take a look at http://www.pcengines.ch/cflash.htm for an example. The CFDISK.5G looks very promising.

How well do these things work? Is it worth the expense?

The advantange would be less heat and space needed in the cabinet.

A 512mb CF card should be able to hold win98 plus a fair number of roms I would think. Obviously I can't get all 4000+ games but I am not looking for that anyway.

[SaiNRuB]

I am interested in this method also, but i dont know anything about how you set it up our what else is involved as far as parts. This site you linked to looks interesting but this is all i knew up to this point was that this part is required to interface the compact flash card to the ide header. I know nothing about how to set up your bios and what additional software settings need to be made and additonally if there is any software that must be installed when using this. Id like to learn more about it myself.

[mlcampbe]

From my research it is just a simple as plugging in the IDE adapter and then putting in a CF card. When you boot up the CF card looks like a normal hard disk and you can format/install windows as normal. I may be wrong but that is why I was looking for anyone that had tried it to get their experiences.

[Samstag]

Yeah that's pretty much the way it works.  Plug it into your IDE cable and the CF card looks and acts like a hard drive.  A very slow hard drive.  I think the speediest (most expensive) flash cards run at about 1/10 the speed of an average hard drive.  A 512 card will easily hold a lean version of 98se, a front end, and plenty of classics.  I was thinking about using wireless ethernet if I needed more space.

[SirPeale]

I know it's been done, and it works well.  From what I read, the problem comes with the number of times you can read/write the card.  They wear out, aparently.

[Chris]

I know it's been done, and it works well.

[cbmeeks]

I know it's been done, and it works well.  From what I read, the problem comes with the number of times you can read/write the card.  They wear out, aparently.

If that's the case, I would use DOS instead of Windows... far less disk activity.

Peale is correct.   It's a lot but you would be surprised at how fast it could happen.  I *think* it is 300,000 writes but if you ran Windows with a swap file, then that could happen pretty fast.

If you put windows on it, I suggest disabling the swap file (even though it is not recommended and might crash your computer) and put a TON of ram in it.

IMHO, CF is not really recommended for a cab.  If it were a bar-top where space is critical then maybe...but honestly, how hard is it to find room for a harddrive in a giant cabinet?  lol

I don't think the speed of the CF would be a real issue since you wouldn't be loading/saving a lot....and if you had a bunch of ram, then MAME and the rom should be loaded once into memory....we're only talking a few megs at most per game...or less for the classics.

Don't worry about the heat of the HD.  You should have a small fan pulling out heat anyway.

cb

[Hoagie_one]

i was thinking about using the CF for a hard drive in my new project.....putting a computer for emulation inside of an old SNES case.

Tight space.

[Chris]

I know it's been done, and it works well.

[cbmeeks]

Hoagie_one:

well, then that might be worth it....lol

Check this out:

http://www.junkmachine.com/forum/kb.php?mode=article&k=11&page_num=1&start=0


Chris:

Yeah, DOS would be the way to go...I just can't justify the expense of an extra card when a HD would provilde a better choice....

however, I admit...the CF is probably more stable and least likely to crash

[SirPeale]

300,000 writes, but what about reads?

[mlcampbe]

How can access to the CF card be slower than a hard disk? There are no moving parts and after all it is really just memory isn't it? I personally thought access would be faster but that was just an assumption.

[lokki]

It's the type of memory that does it. It is not the same as your computers RAM

http://www.howstuffworks.com/flash-memory.htm

[wj2k3]

SanDisks Extreme III 4.0GB flash card reads at upto 20MB/sec where as Western Digital says it's mainstream hard drive reads at upto 100MB/sec (ATA/100).

Of course the 4.0GB compact flash card costs about $500.

You could also use a thumb drive and USB 2.0 to do this, but that would eliminate the use of DOS.

A hard drive would seem more appropriate for a full size cab where heat really should not be an issue, but it might good for smaller sized projects.

just my 2 cents

[MameJunkie]

300,000 writes, but what about reads?

On flash memory, its writing that wears it out.  Not the reads.
At work, we use nvram that has ~100,000 write cycles. 

[garyh]

My upright cab http://web.ukonline.co.uk/gary.hitchen/mame.htm uses CF as a hard drive and the bartop I'm building at present will also do the same.

My website is slightly out of date as I have now also installed DOSCab jukebox and changed to a dual-slot CF IDE adaptor. Slot 1 (primary IDE) has a 256Mb card that boots into DOS and runs ArcadeOS and DMAME. Slot 2 (secondary IDE) has a 1Gb CF full of OGG music files for DOSCab to play. I use this to provide music while I'm working in my garage (how I envy those with dedicated games rooms!).

The bartop will use a single 64Mb CF card bootng into DOS and running Vantage.

A search on eBay for "CF IDE" will give lots of hits for suitable cards. You may need to setup the Cylinders/Heads/Sectors settings in your BIOS. This table may be useful: http://chinese-watercolor.com/LRP/hd/ide-cf.html

Gary

[jace055]

This sounds like a great idea!  However, I would load to the OS into a ram drive at startup and read the roms from a DVD/CD unless you have enough ram to load the games as well.  That would Keep the read and writes off of the drive. 

[rdagger]

You could use a solid state hard drive:

http://www.contecusa.com/?page=prod_detail&id=58&cat_id=17&prod_id=533&CFID=54981&CFTOKEN=61567898

Check out the speed in this review:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=49&page=1

[anthonylitz]

i was thinking about using the CF for a hard drive in my new project.....putting a computer for emulation inside of an old SNES case.

Tight space.

   That sounds really cool!!

Anthony

[JoyMonkey]

TV Harmony just posted a guide on how to run Windows XP from a CF card. Take a look:
http://www.tvharmony.com/blog/archives/2004/12/booting_windows_1.html

It doesn't mention the writing life-span of CF cards, but it explains how to trim XP down to a size that will fit on a 512mb card.

[Lilwolf]

At my last job we moved Linux + our product to run on these cards...  This is what we found.

Reads didn't have the problems as writes.  There will be a max... but it wasn't in the same realm... Like 100million reads to a 1million writes or something.

Databases and Swapfiles are OUT!  You will kill your card in weeks / months depending.

Mame, you might want to disable the save files.  This can happen by launching each game once and then set the files to read only.  Mame wont override it.  If you want to change setting you have to set them to read/write.

As for the speed.  The seek time is MUCH faster then a harddrive... but the total throughput is slower.  So loading smaller roms will be faster...

You might also want to load the mame.exe noncompressed and compressed and see if it speeds things up.   Because of the faster seek time... you should be able to load the parts in mame that you need faster then loading the entire file... but uncompressing them in memory might make up for it.

Anyway... The total number of writes allows for you to play around a lot without trouble... just make sure your OS doesn't write to the drive whenever it feels like it.

[Grasshopper]

I read an article about this in a magazine recently, and apparently most modern motherboards allow you to boot from a USB device. So theoretically you could install DOS MAME on a USB pen drive and boot from that!

You could have some USB ports on your cab (perhaps behind a lockable panel) and when you want to reconfigure the machine you just take the pen drive out and put another in. How cool is that.

Unfortunately my motherboard, which is only a couple of years old, does not support this feature. Might be time for an upgrade....

[Silver]

Yes you can happily boot straight to DOS/Linux etc off a usb pendrive. Works fine, although is a bit slower thatn a CF card. Your Bios Must support this.

You can NOT boot XP off a usb pen drive, I believe.

Xp will work 'fine' off  a CF card with an IDE adaptor. Yes the system/BIOS sees it as a standard IDE drive - no motherboard 'support' required. Yes the real-world speed of CF card/USB pen drives is MUCH SLOWER than any modern hard drive, but this is not a problem at all for smaller OS's (Dos is fine. Xp is not)

If you want to install XP on a CF, you need to install it on a standard hard drive first and then copy the whole lot over using partition magic AFTER you have configured stuff like turning off virtual memory. I recommend using something like nLite is strip XP before installation (http://nuhi.msfn.org/) as you can get it under 256 meg (just).

I do not reccommend XP though, because you can not turn off writing to the drive no matter how much tinkering to do. This is why Dos or Linux are so good here - Dos basically won't write to the drive unless you tell it (mame will only for hiscores etc...) and with linux I believe you can 'mount' your drives as read-only.

I looked into XP-Embedded solely for the reason that it has a optional 'driver' to disable all writes to the drive (it makes a small ramdrive for compulsory saves) as it is designed to be able to run off Read Only drives. Howver I failed to get embedded even installed on my motherboard. (Via mini-Itx)

[elvis]

I would much prefer a CD or DVD based setup to CF.  CF costs quite a bit per megabyte compared to the couple of cents you pay for a blank CDROM.

[captainpotato]

This sounds like a great idea!  However, I would load to the OS into a ram drive at startup and read the roms from a DVD/CD unless you have enough ram to load the games as well.  That would Keep the read and writes off of the drive. 

Perhaps the AdvanceCD distribution could be used instead? Download, set up the ROMs correctly, create an ISO of the final version and then copy it to the CF card. As AdvanceCD is read-only (obviously) and sets up the machine settings upon boot and runs happily without using a hard drive, there would be no need to write to the CF card.

In my (limited) experience, AdvanceCD has decent hardware detection, so you could consider this.

[Grasshopper]

In my previous post I said that my motherboard (Asus A7V8X) did not have the facility to boot from a USB device. At least that is what it says on Asus' website. According to them only the newer A7V8X-X revision of the board has this facility.

But as I was already on Asus' site I decided to update my motherboard's BIOS to the latest version anyway.

Updating a BIOS always scares me a bit but it went ok.

I then went to the boot options and looked under removable devices. Holy $h*t two new options: USB FDD and USB ZIP!

So I'm now wondering whether it is possible to configure a pen drive so that the BIOS sees it as either a USB floppy or USB ZIP drive. If that's possible then I'm in business.