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I've seen a few articles online where network appliances are running Compact Flash rather than a hard drive. There's also a few people who have loaded the Linux Kernel onto compact flash...and if I remember correctly there was a company called L-Inc who were using something similar on their desktop offerings.
The information I have gathered says that compact flash is considerably faster than any hard disk (this information may be dated, I haven't compared specifications)--The main 2 drawbacks are #1-the capacity of the compact flash #2-the limited number of write/flush/write
Unlike hard disks, compact flash cards can only be written, flushed (or contents deleted) and then re-written 100,000 times---so if you put your pagefile onto compactflash it would be toasted in a matter of minutes.
But I am very curious to see what kind of performance you might see with the following setup:
-C:\ (1 gig compactflash) Win XP -D:\ sata disk or raid0 with program files and page file
The price of compact flash has gone down so much that I believe you can get a 1 gig card for very cheap. There is an adapter that allows the card to plugin to a standard IDE interface that runs about $20. I may have to test this out.
On the old dated information that I found on this using ata 66--compact flash clocked:
2ms seek time, 2.5 megabyte per second transfer. (note Seagate Barracude #ST3160023AS SATA disk has 8.5 MS seek rate)
It may not hold up against SATA...but a simple benchmark may be in order.
Last edited by unstable on Sat Feb 05, 2005 8:34 am; edited 1 time in total
Yeah to my understanding L-Inc uses Solid State disks, which is comparable to using compact flash...their machines look cool, but they are too pricey.
Actually last I heard L-Inc wasn't doing business anymore. We tried to order some monitors from them quite awhile back and after jerking us around for a few months saying they were backordered, we were told they were discontinued.
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