SFiorito

Yeah I used froogle, but to get the SanDisk Extreme 1GB which from reviews has higher transfer rates (about 10MBps) compared to other cards. It's more expensive than the regular SanDisk cards. There's a new Extreme III which has transfer rates above 12MBps, but it's not on sale yet unfortunately.

lopan

So whats the difference between say sandisk regular 1gb card and the sandisk ultra? You can get the ultra 1gb card for 83 bucks... is it just the speed? Ultra is the only one with specs that I saw, ULTRA II, 1000MB, 60X 10MB/SEC READ, 9MB/SEC. WRITE SPEED.

lopan

ah... cool, you just answered my question

Just curious, Knubile did you get a regular sandisk card or an ultra/extreme?

SFiorito

this is the comparison test i used... http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...?cid=6007-6133

lopan

So if the extreme is 11.232 and the ultra is 11.111, do you really think you'd see a big difference between the two in this application?

SFiorito

maybe, maybe not, I just figured every bit may help.

lopan

true... I'm lookin at the 2 gig, so's I can get a whole GPS app on there as well... probably be able to swing a 2 gig ultra II... Then again, I'm going to have to have an external for music, might as well use it for maps to...

knubile

I haven't bought anything yet. But I'm totally ready to. I think i'll let SFiorito be the test dummy with the Sandisk CF card. If it doesn't work out, i'll be a test dummy for another brand. Anyone else want to hop in the test dummy line?

BTW SFiorito. I left you a private message.

SFiorito

Oh great thanks man!!! With my luck it'll be a big mess...

lopan

so last night downloaded virtual pc.... set up everything... I've got ewf enabled, files dissapear and whatnot, however I noticed if I shutdown gracefully everything is fine, if not I get the "windows didn't shutdown gracefully"... so the ewf stuff is only happening once registry is loaded and the boot process for XP is occuring? Does that mean you'll still be writing to the cf for system states for xp? I know we covered that, but I still don't get it sorry, I realize the OS is set to not write but what about all the writing thats happening during boot and whatnot?

SFiorito

Hmmm... that doesn't sound right, because the special NTLDR is supposed to prevent writes during bootup. You copied that file over as well? I always get that bootup error message, which is why I disabled it in the bootup options. That happens because I guess EWF filters out a write to the registry somewhere so Windows always thinks you didn't bootup successfully last time. Look at the harddrive activity light on VirtualPC. Green is reading, red is writing. You shouldn't be getting any red lights. I don't.

lopan

been playing with it all day, it seems to flash red once right before the xp loading screen... none after that... still not right?

And yeah I got the special ntldr, renamed ntldr and everything....

SFiorito

okay, i checked using vmware and performance logs and it looks like there is indeed 1KB written to the drive on bootup. I guess it's not horrible, but when I have some time I'm going to check to see if it does that in XP Embedded as well. Maybe it just needs to. I still get that error message asking to boot up normally though.

lopan

I think most CF's can do hundreds of thousands if not millions of writes.... I'm guessing if it's only 1kb every boot, it might give out sometime in the year 2050?? most likely it'll get updated to something new well before then...

lopan

BTW: dunno if it was already covered, but did you disable the page file? I did, got everything on the disk down to about 500mb.... but dunno how that'll affect performance, or how ewf handles the page file.

I somehow managed to remove hibernate though, so messing with nlite to get it back, any clues on what to NOT remove to keep that? nlite just has a checkbox to disable hibernate, however whether I check or uncheck it seems to not be included.