Compact flash card harddrive on a T20

[TomKroscavage]

I just got an "as is" T20 on ebay and got it running. I'm on the internets now running Knoppix from a cd and no hard drive. The T20 has two 128mb sticks of memory. I have a 2GB compact flash card and a ide hard drive adapter coming in the mail. I would like to use the card as the only hard drive. Has anyone here done something similar? Will it work? I have an xp build 1 I trimmed down with Nlite and it will run on another 2G hard drive I have. Also I've read the T20 will take 1Gb and .5Gb of ram which is it?

[kocoman]

Yes I want to try too on my 600E because the hard drive always got broken. I am thinking of 1GB CF. (for debian) but I don't know if 600E will boot off CF.

[TomKroscavage]

I still don't have the drive but I've done some more research and this is what I learned.

1. A CF card cannot handle high write cycles. Swap or paging must be turned off.


2. There is a big difference in CF read-write speeds. The card I have is a 150X advertised on ebay as the fastest. The specs are not up there with the 7K100, and Most cards are even slower.

[alagregg]

i have had my t23 running DOS from CF cards before (just to test it really).

also having a bootable DOS CF Disk has been helpful for firmware flashing.

It can definately be done, but as previously commented Flash memory dies after a lot of writes so virtual memory is very bad news for a CF based system.

as a result don't expect to be able to run windows XP off a CF card, but it certainly can run slower, more simple O/S's

On the other hand CF has the big advantage of being immune to shocks which would damage a hard disk.