Thread: boot from CF?

Basically you get a CF to IDE adaptor, set it as your master, and install your OS on it. You won't notice much, if any, difference in POST time. Your boot time could improve dramatically, assuming your hard drive seek time (and not your processor speed) was previously your bottleneck. I'm not sure if they make smart card to IDE adaptors (not my department -- anyone else?), but if they do, it ought to work just fine. However, it probably wouldn't work with your mobo's built-in smart card reader, as that's likely not going to be on the IDE (or SCSI) bus.

I remember reading on here that people didn't experience any speed difference with using CF media as opposed to a decent HDD. The only advantage to the CF, being durability.

I dunno how fast a harddrive can be... I guess it also depends on the processor you have too... but post-bios boots are pretty cool times. Besides durability (although these things blow after a few thousand writes/rewrites) it also is a little bit faster than a harddrive.

There are smart card ide readers, but they are too expensive to justify the cheaper cost of smart cards. (www.mesanet.com)

From the reviews that Ive read, the compact flash can nearly max out the ide bus, so its a lot fast. its flaw in an windows environment is that it will wear out after a few hundered thousand read/write cycles, which seems like a lot, but wouldnt last very long as a scratch disk to windows. a lot of people use some custom installs of linux on a cf card.