Main > Main Forum
Compact Flash hard drives
<< < (5/6) > >>
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:

--- Quote from: jace055 on December 14, 2004, 05:52:50 pm ---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. 

--- End quote ---

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.
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page

Go to full version