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Internal Flash Drive(s) as C:

T

TandyMan100

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My 5gig HD is up for a replacement, and I was thinking of taking a few 4gig Flashies and putting them somewhere inside my computer. I want my computer to see them all as 1 hard drive, and think it's the C: drive. I am using Win98.
 
TandyMan100 said:
My 5gig HD is up for a replacement, and I was thinking of taking a few 4gig Flashies and putting them somewhere inside my computer. I want my computer to see them all as 1 hard drive, and think it's the C: drive. I am using Win98.
Click to expand...

What type of computer do you plan on putting a CF inside of?

I found CF cards way to slow for modern computers using modern operating systems, even windows 98 might be slow during writes to the CF card in comparison to a real hard drive.

You might be better of with a micro hard drive used in laptops?
 
I'm just wanting to use four flash drives as my C: drive. Is there some way to do this in DOS, and format it so that the computer sees it as a regular Hard Drive? Perhaps an adaptor that will let me plug it into the plug on the inside of the computer...
 
There are 2 different types of ways to get RAID to work... software... or hardware.

Hardware RAID will let you plug in multiple drives and use the RAID controller's software to create a logical disk that the OS sees and uses.

Software RAID does the same thing but with OS drivers to interact with the hardware. Windows NT, 2K, etc, lets you do this but 95/98/ME and others don't.

You should look at a PCI RAID controller to hook up 4 of the flash drives.

HOWEVER... be aware that there are finite # of writes you can do on those drives before they start to die. You are better off buying a solid state disk instead. At least the SSD will have intelligence to map out bad sections of the drive as they pop up.

The SSD also can spread writes out across the drive to keep from hammering away at the same spot repeatedly. Your regular CF drives will have a shorter life because of that repeated hammering away at the same spot... (writing over & over)

If you want a combination of the two then use a CF drive for the OS and a hard disk for booting, temp files, and swap space. It's ALWAYS faster to put the swap space on a separate physical hard drive from the OS anyway.

RJ
 
channelmaniac said:
There are 2 different types of ways to get RAID to work... software... or hardware.
Click to expand...
And of course the third type which at first glance looks like hardware RAID, but actually does a lot of the work in software. A lot of the cheaper RAID cards use this approach. For these you need to make sure there's a driver available for your OS, which could be a problem for Win98.

channelmaniac said:
HOWEVER... be aware that there are finite # of writes you can do on those drives before they start to die. You are better off buying a solid state disk instead. At least the SSD will have intelligence to map out bad sections of the drive as they pop up.

The SSD also can spread writes out across the drive to keep from hammering away at the same spot repeatedly. Your regular CF drives will have a shorter life because of that repeated hammering away at the same spot... (writing over & over)
Click to expand...
Most if not all CF cards have the same kind of "wear leveling" built in. If you're looking at 4GB cards, they're going to be pretty recent and I can't imagine them not having this feature.
 
You'll need a CF-IDE adapter for every card you connect (there are also double CF-IDE adapters that let you plug two cards). On the software front, this looks like worth a try:

http://raid2raid.com/
 
If you're going to use a CF card as your C drive, you're probably best off to use an OS that is actually designed to be run on it. There's lots of Linux distros that are designed to minimize the amount of writes to the CF card. However, if you insist on putting Windows on that thing, turn disk caching off.

With either OS, make sure you have a good amount of RAM to make up for the lack of disk caching.

And as someone said earlier, CF cards are much slower than using real HDs. The only reason I use a CF card in my garage computer is because of the extreme temperatures we have here in Canada. But the computer runs flawlessly in -30 degrees. They're also good if the computer is put in an environment where there's a lot of vibration.
 
gerrydoire said:
What type of computer do you plan on putting a CF inside of?

I found CF cards way to slow for modern computers using modern operating systems, even windows 98 might be slow during writes to the CF card in comparison to a real hard drive.

You might be better of with a micro hard drive used in laptops?
Click to expand...

Sandisk ultra 2 CF have minimum read and write of 9 MB per second is that slow?

JT
 
gerrydoire said:
On Modern Computers:
Quite misleading, a CF Card is no Solid State Hard Drive, dead ass slow.

Been there, done that... :confused::confused::confused::confused:
Click to expand...

In theory, the current 45MB/s, UDMA-capable CF cards best the performance of most, if not all, ATA/33 drives. While CF may not be the best solution for "modern computing," as a replacement for a 5GB drive in a Windows 98 system, I imagine it ought to be something of an upgrade. :)
 
gerrydoire said:
On Modern Computers:
Quite misleading, a CF Card is no Solid State Hard Drive, dead ass slow.

Been there, done that... :confused::confused::confused::confused:
Click to expand...

I've thought that interleaving (with read-ahead) several CF cards and lots of cache could help a lot. But that's more than a simple IDE controller will do--and you still have the limited write-cycle limitation.
 
Cloudschatze said:
In theory, the current 45MB/s, UDMA-capable CF cards best the performance of most, if not all, ATA/33 drives. While CF may not be the best solution for "modern computing," as a replacement for a 5GB drive in a Windows 98 system, I imagine it ought to be something of an upgrade. :)
Click to expand...

I've tried this stuff, was beyond slow..

I currently have a real Solid State HD.
 
While CF may not be the best solution for "modern computing," as a replacement for a 5GB drive in a Windows 98 system, I imagine it ought to be something of an upgrade.
Click to expand...

I'd consider it a downgrade with the slower speed and the limited writes. But again, I think it would depend on your application of it. In my case where the CF is running in -30 degree weather, it would be much more reliable than a real HD or a DVD drive.

Or perhaps you want to be running your computer while rolling it down a hill or something :)
 
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