http://www.google.com/search?q=FDM80SQI16G&tb … rnal+hard+drive

Not too bad on price.

http://www.emphase.com/40-pin-ide-flash-modul … dustrial-grade/

IDE Transfer Mode
PIO mode 0–4
Ultra DMA mode 0–6
Multiword DMA mode 0–2
Data Transfer Rate Read 85 MB/sec.; Write 75 MB/sec.

Specs seem to be as fast as CF and PATA SSD and likely much more compatible

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp … eId=1&name=600X

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en& … ed=0CIEBEPMCMAA

Review: http://www.amazon.com/Transcend-IDE-Flash-Mod … iews/B00138TL2G

IDE>CF adapter + CF card is better value IMO.

But this is a very neat / clean / minimalistic solution which has it's benefits.

I think you're right, once you get to 8GB+, the price skyrockets. Now you've got me eyeballing CF cards and adapters. 😉

If you were to put together a Win98SE machine on a CF "drive," would it be worthwhile to stick 512MB of RAM in the system and disable the page file?

I'm more into DOS, but AFAIK CF aren't that suited for W98 because they can wear out or something like that. But there are heaps of W98 experts here, I'm sure someone knows the answer!

I'm running a Win98SE and a Win2K installation on a 4GB and 8GB CF card.

The lifetime of these cards is limited with any Windows prior to Win7, but you can try to reduce write access as much as possible.
Disable indexing of files, stick a lot of RAM in the machine (and make a RAMdisk for swapping) to reduce HDD access by disabling the swap file...basically you should disable anything that makes repeated writes to the drive. Don't run defrag, disable automatic defragmentation etc.

Try to leave as much free space as humanly possible on the card to ensure that the wear leveling has ample space to work with. Every free MB will increase the lifetime of a card.

I wouldn't recommend these cards for productivity systems you use for hours on a daily basis.
For testing purposes I put a cheap 4GB CF card in my main system (15h+/day uptime) and stuffed all swap/temp/cache files and folders on it. It lastet a couple of weeks 😉

But for retro systems, which don't have important data on them and are just used once in a while to play some classics, I absolutely recommend these cards, even with win9x and above as the OS, but again, not as the only drive. If you install a lot of games, you should probably get an additional HDD for storage.

One more thing to consider is the speed advantage, which doesn't really matter at low clock speeds. My P233MMX is faster in Win98SE from the CF card, but not what you would expect from the very low access times.
My other CF-enabled system (Athlon XP 2600+) can really utilize the low access times and the Win2K installation flies like the wind. It's amazing 😀

Edit: Strictly speaking, DOS isn't a good choice for a CF/SSD either, but write access is reasonably low, so it should last longer than a Win9x installation.

Just keep the OS as lightweight as possible. I'm using 98lite in addition to my own tweaks to reduce space usage and write access.

Yea with my DOS machine it's just adding a few save games here and there and that's it 😀

It's mostly just reading...

Mystery wrote:

I'm running a Win98SE and a Win2K installation on a 4GB and 8GB CF card. […]
Show full quote

I'm running a Win98SE and a Win2K installation on a 4GB and 8GB CF card.

The lifetime of these cards is limited with any Windows prior to Win7, but you can try to reduce write access as much as possible.
Disable indexing of files, stick a lot of RAM in the machine (and make a RAMdisk for swapping) to reduce HDD access by disabling the swap file...basically you should disable anything that makes repeated writes to the drive. Don't run defrag, disable automatic defragmentation etc.

Try to leave as much free space as humanly possible on the card to ensure that the wear leveling has ample space to work with. Every free MB will increase the lifetime of a card.

I wouldn't recommend these cards for productivity systems you use for hours on a daily basis.
For testing purposes I put a cheap 4GB CF card in my main system (15h+/day uptime) and stuffed all swap/temp/cache files and folders on it. It lastet a couple of weeks 😉

But for retro systems, which don't have important data on them and are just used once in a while to play some classics, I absolutely recommend these cards, even with win9x and above as the OS, but again, not as the only drive. If you install a lot of games, you should probably get an additional HDD for storage.

One more thing to consider is the speed advantage, which doesn't really matter at low clock speeds. My P233MMX is faster in Win98SE from the CF card, but not what you would expect from the very low access times.
My other CF-enabled system (Athlon XP 2600+) can really utilize the low access times and the Win2K installation flies like the wind. It's amazing 😀

Edit: Strictly speaking, DOS isn't a good choice for a CF/SSD either, but write access is reasonably low, so it should last longer than a Win9x installation.

Just keep the OS as lightweight as possible. I'm using 98lite in addition to my own tweaks to reduce space usage and write access.

On the other hand, for systems that you can customise much better than Windows (eg Unix), CF drives are pretty good as noiseless, zero-heat, OS drives. You have the OS installed on the card, but areas of the disk that would normally be written to (eg tmp, the log directories, your downloaded update/patch file areas) you instead mount into ram-based filesystem. The result is that only reads come from the CF device and non-persistent files are flushed from memory on a regular basis/reboot.

I've been using a CF card as the boot/OS drive in my home linux fileserver for about 2 years now. The nice thing about it is that the system is virtually silent when not accessing the shares (and lower power, too!); the OS drive would normally not spin down as there's always something logging or writing to disk - the worst thing would be to be constantly spinning up and down.

Quite a few blade and high density computing rack systems use similar setups; with the solid state storage (be it CF, SD or similar) holding a minimal boot OS and primary storage mounted from a SAN or suchlike. Again, it's only really a read-medium, so the limited write cycles are not an issue.

You can not really destroy a CF card with writing.
Just take a look at the SanDisk CF manual for standard grade cards: http://www.synchrotech.com/support-download/P … tdGradev1.5.pdf
It is from 2004, so covers low capacity CFs as used in older systems. They give as data 300.000 write cycles (Page 8 point 2.4) and state that wear leveling is always enabled (Page 4, point 1.7.3.).
So assuming you have a 4 GB card writing full speed with 3 MB/s and wear leveling distributes writes evenly.
3*10^5 * 4*10^9 / 3*10^6 B/s is 4*10^8 seconds until there is a 50 % chance first flash cells go bad.
This is 12.7 years continuous writing already for such old CF cards.

I doubt a used old hard drive is more reliable.

(I know that this estimation is simplified as whole flash blocks are written, but still - there are more important things to worry about).

Thanks for the info, everyone. I'm putting together a P3/Win98SE system and this is all good to know. I am tempted by the CF-IDE idea, but if it's recommended that I still install games on a regular 3.5" hard drive, I might as well keep things simple and just use a regular hard drive for everything!

Stull wrote:

Does anyone have an experience with, or opinions about these Transcend IDE vertical flash modules? http://i.imgur.com/4h17X.jpg […]
Show full quote

Does anyone have an experience with, or opinions about these Transcend IDE vertical flash modules?

It seems like a good candidate for a DOS machine, but maybe I'm overlooking something?

I use these, I have a 1GB and a 4GB module. It is nice to just plug it directly on the motherboard, without much cables, just a small power cord. Compatibility, reliability and speed have been fine so far. I installed DOS 7.10 on the 1GB module, and Win98SE on the 4GB Module on two partitions.

http://www.supertalent.com/products/ssd_categ … il.php?type=FDM
http://www.supertalent.com/products/flash-mod … le.php?type=IDE

http://www.google.com/search?q=transcend+32gb … iw=1920&bih=912