Compact Flash for TP 560x

[gadiyar]

Hi,
I managed to find a used 6GB hard drive for my 560x. I should be getting it next week. Hopefully I won't have to throw away the system for a while now.
I'm worried about the reliability of mechanical hard disks. Is it possible to use a Sandisk compact flash PCMCIA adapter and a CF disk to boot the laptop and run Windows?
If anyone has tried this, please let me know your experiences.

Thanks,
Anand

[Severian]

Howdy,
I have done this just to see if it worked. It worked fine. You are concerned about hard drive reliability and you are right to be. But, cf cards are not the answer. They have a limited lifetime in the number of wriites they can handles to the same spot. With most normal filesystems, the directory area will be written to frequently an that will probably be your failure point. There are industrial grade cf media and that would help. For longer term solutions with cf media, you need to be tricky. You have to use special filesystems that spread the writes around the drive or you can keep the filesystems unmounted except for occasional use.
Good luck