USB bootup question

[Dexter]

I'm planning on buying a new motherboard to install in my arcade cabinet that can boot from usb. My idea is to use a small usb pendrive with Arcadeos etc. installed on it so that the machine will boot to menu as quick as possible.

It should be possible to even fit Win98se, Gamelauncher and a few other bits and pieces onto a 256MB or 512 MB pendrive, will this make a huge difference if I decide to go the windows route with the cabinet?

Has anybody else tried this and have you ran into any problems??

Thanks in avance

Dexter

[paigeoliver]

Just use DOS on a harddrive. 95 percent of the boot time on a modern DOS system is in the pre-boot process. (All that RAM counting, and farting around before it decides to actually start loading the operating system)/

That pen drive would probably only save you a half second, if even that. It could also quite possibly be a lot slower, as a modern hard drive has a much higher transfer speed than what a USB port has.

[Dexter]

Ta for the info, I think you can switch off the ram test on bootup on most motherboards, yes??

Dexter

[paigeoliver]

Yes. But even with every speed up option on, you are still looking at 10 or 20 seconds between the time you turn on the power button, and when the comp starts loading the OS. DOS can load in around a second on a newer PC.

[Dexter]

Cool, that should do it, thanks again!

Dexter

[BillyJack]

I like your idea about the pen drive... it made me think of another product that could be of use.  There's a CompactFlash to IDE adapter that can be used to make a bootable system disk out of a CF card.  It might come in handy if someone is trying to get the computer "footprint" as small as possible...  idunno, just rambling I guess.

[Xamfear]

Booting off of CF is a raw deal for a couple of reasons

1 CF is slow.  You can find '28x' (1x = only around 150k) speed cf cards from some specialty camera shops, but HD's are still much much faster - top end cards max out at under 4mb a second and thats a burst rateing.

2 CF cards have a finite read/write lifetime of several thousand writes and if the card recieved heavy use (like what an OS would place on as opposed to relativly light use in a camera)  it would become much more likly to fail.

I've seen the IDE adapters of which you speak and they are inexpensive ($15) enough to look like they might be fun to play with - but I would not have high expectations of their performance or reliability.

[shmokes]

The only reason to do this is novelty.  Can you imagine how little a 256 MB or 512 MB hard drive would cost.  You can get a 100 GB hard drive with a 100 MB/s transfer rate for much less than a 1/2 GB pen drive.  You are thinking of sacrificing an enormous amount of speed, limiting yourself to a crippling size and spending lots of money to accomplish these things.

Dump this idea like toxic waste into a mountain stream.

P.S.  before someone says, "yeah, but USB 2.0 has a 400 MB/s transfer rate" also consider things like random access speeds, etc.  Operating systems were designed around hard drives (and the other way around).