Quote: Originally Posted by ecolner
a) I figure booting off a flash card could be faster and more efficient, plus this would allow that much more music storage on the HD. Is that correct?
and
Quote: Originally Posted by GingerPrince
a) no, plus you'll knacker it in no time due to excessive writes.
Well yes and no to both of these responses...
What you really want is an EIDE based flash drive that attached just like a hard drive to you PC (via the EIDE bus). This is very shock resistant, instant on, and fast to READ from.
It is NOT fast to write to (in fact it is very slow), and has a life associated with how many write can be done to it (usually about 100,000. which is not alot).
Windoze likes to cache memory to the hard drive, so you would as GingerPrince put it "Knacker it" in no time, IF you used the normal ATAPI.SYS driver that is normally used for hard drives.
What you want to do is to replace ATAPI.SYS with a special device driver that allows reads to come from the flash hard drive, and write to go to a simulated hard drive in memory (i.e. RAM). What this mean is that all writes to the "hard drive" would be lost, but it would not "knacker up"
(love that term) your flash drive!
This is the same approached used when booting Windows from a CD-ROM only PC (as is done in slot machines!).
Also, these flash drives are not cheap and pretty small, typically a 650 MB drive is around $200 US. For that kind of money you can get hundreds of GBs in a hard drive.
Chris