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USB bootup question
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).