Thread: medium for the OS...

875MB os? which one is that? I wouldnt recommend using CF or proms for their speed. They are slower than an ATA drive. The fastest thing out there is scsi 320 followed by scsi160 and then serial ata. (we will leave out the fiber channels and stuff like that). Personally, there isnt an os that cant be installed in uner 500 meg, and once your up it wont matter. You could get a board that supports linux bios. That gets your system to protected mode a lot faster and can help with boot speed. You could still boot any version of windoze from it as well. I personally use a very small custom compiled kernel with all the support I need built in. I use linux though, you cant do an install like that with windows. Good luck on you search.

Originally Posted by ScYThE

You could get a board that supports linux bios. That gets your system to protected mode a lot faster and can help with boot speed. You could still boot any version of windoze from it as well.

Thought you couldn't use Windoze with LinuxBIOS because it doesn't implement the BIOS IO calls that Windoze uses?

I found a SEAGATE 9.2GB U160SCA 3.9ms 80-pin 4M 15K SCSI with a one year 1 year warranty for 67$.!!! I dont know if I want to go with scsi in my car, but it sure is fast. I think I am going to go ahead and get it, cause it aint that much and I can always use it on my server if it won't work for me...now I just need to get a good scsi card to plug into that one pci slot on the epia. Thanks.

For what its worth -

I was doing some testing with an IBM microdrive, and A sandisk (both 1 gb)

Keep in mind the microdrive is a mini hard disk (plater , spindle, motor) the sandisk unit is all solid state flash memory.

The sandisk was about half the speed of the microdrive.
( I think sandisk makes a faster unit, but its like 500.00 US) the microdrive is under 200 I think

but will it beat a standard hard drive? I mean there are not really any specs that we can compare these flash drives with HD.

Short Answer, you are not going to find a flash drive of any type that will outperform a desktop hard drive.

Originally Posted by GingerPrince

Thought you couldn't use Windoze with LinuxBIOS because it doesn't implement the BIOS IO calls that Windoze uses?

They have already successfully boot WIN2k from a linux bios machine. Just go to http://www.linuxbios.org/news/index.html#NT and they can give you more information. They will work with you and Windows for the most part doesnt use the bios after it boots. It mainly uses its own IO to begin with.

Originally Posted by sounder

I found a SEAGATE 9.2GB U160SCA 3.9ms 80-pin 4M 15K SCSI with a one year 1 year warranty for 67$.!!! I dont know if I want to go with scsi in my car, but it sure is fast. I think I am going to go ahead and get it, cause it aint that much and I can always use it on my server if it won't work for me...now I just need to get a good scsi card to plug into that one pci slot on the epia. Thanks.

FWIW, in my experience SCSI drives are pretty sensitive to heat (relatively speaking - being high rpm and all). If you are doing nothing but read ops, then having a SCSI over a standard 3.25" or 2.5" IDE drive isn't going to gain you much. Chances are that an IDE drive with a fairly contiguous file system will give you burst read rates that are acceptable. If you run windows, I don't think you can beat my boot time of about 30 seconds into XP by much even with a SCSI drive, and I'm using just a typical 5400 rpm 40gb 2.5" drive.

IMO, you should save yourself the trouble and use an IDE drive. Save the CF card for loading small files... like boot scripts or something.

I figured as much Froto, but I was getting tired and thought for some reason the idea of not having a spin up would help the file access time. I am going to look into the linux bios. I can get win xp pro in about 23 sec. The bottle neck on all pc are the HD, but I was exploring the idea. Im gunna test a scsi setup and see, you never know.and it could spin 15000rpm out of the case and cut my car in half.