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Compact Flash hard drives
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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.
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