Thinkpads Forum

I have been thinking about the idea of replacing the hard drive in my X61s with a compact flash card, in order to reduce heat, save on battery, and better protect my data.

I figure a 16 gig CF card would hold an OS (I use Linux but windows would be the same idea) and all the apps I would need, and I have a 160 gig 2.5" USB powered external hard drive, and with SD cards and USB drives I don't see a problem with having enough space for my needs.

I see that there are SATA (I have an X61s that requires SATA) to CF card adapters (going for between $30-55 USD), and I am curious if anyone has any ideas or experience about using something like this in a laptop. First of all, whether or not it would fit, and second, whether it would stay in place well (I imagine it would all take up less space than a regular 2.5" drive, and I want to be sure it's not going to fall out of the SATA connector). I am also concerned with what kind of speed I should expect, if it would be usable or not.

I would really appreciate any ideas people have on the subject.

this has been asked a number of times (search 'compact flash boot'). This thread has some info; as does this. The latter seems to hold some promise--especially the detailed instructions in the last post--but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. Perhaps you're the one to solve this for us! I, for one, would be interested to hear your results. Good luck!

Just have seen THIS on today's Cebit News. But it's only in Czech language, no referneces... and also couldn't find any news in english... maybe later.

It's 2.5 SATA "harddrive" with 2 CF slots. Producer is Stardom.
Hopefuly there will be some others infos in few days...

Thanks so much for the info both of you.

I plan on doing some more research and seeing what I can figure out, and once the quarter is over in a couple weeks at school I will make a decision and order some memory.

I will update this thread with anything interesting I find, and once I have the time to do so some information on how the process went.

I'm pretty sure this has been done by a few people on the IBM ThinkPad Mailing List. You might want to search their archives. In those cases, the users used them in the CF slot or the pc card slot with an adapter and set the machine to boot from there and installed the OS. The slower 2.5" drive inside the machine was used for storage.

In one case, I think someone used an IDE adapter to make a CF card the sole drive in a 701, as well.