Boot from Cardbus/PCMCIA adapter w/Compact Flash?

With the ever increasing amount of integration in notebook computers, the PCMCIA expansion slot undoubtedly is left unused in a majority of pc users notebooks. Recently on another forum a user posted asking how to adapt a relatively inexpensive 2-4gb compact flash card to replace a 2.5" HDD in an old notebook, while that forum was not oriented specifically towards notebook users, quite a few options were posted on how to accomplish the task.

I feel its necessary to disspell the myth about flash memory's write/rewrite problem before this gets derailed, http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
I'm not concerned about writes/rewrites on CF card, and several windows programs don't operate correctly without a swap file, so back to my original intent:

PCMCIA, Compact Flash, and IDE are electrically compatible, I used a $10 Compact Flash to PCMCIA adapter to create my own IDE to Compact Flash adapter about 7 years ago (long before USB 2.0's ubiquity). What I propose is using a PCMCIA to CF adapter with a CF card of 1-4gb and an installation of Windows. There are plenty of utilities to get this down to size, but first I have a problem:

I don't have a CF card or adapter to test this with. My main concern is having the CF card be recognized by the bios of a notebook as a boot source.

Finally, why? Why do I want to do this?

The main point is to see if comparable performance to a 5400 or 4200 rpm drive can be achieved which would allow either the removal of a hot, power hungry hard drive, or leaving it in simply for storage with aggressive power management and heavy disk to ram caching. Right now true SSDs have high costs, but for less than $40 a decent option which increases battery life could be had.

 

I have wanted to do this for a while but it seems that only very early day notebooks occasionally has the boot from PCMCIA option. Have to settle with a USB thumb for now.

Luckily, with linux I can use an USB thumb boot off but use PCMCIA with CF as the root, more or less what you are trying to do without the need to have the thumb inserted all the time.

Unluckily, linux's suspend/resume is still pretty iffy and more so in situation like this.

 

So, I'm not the only one who had this idea, good. I did something similar with Smart Boot Manager 3.0 (open source software allows you to boot all different kinds of partitions) to get my old notebook to boot m0n0wall(bsd), but I don't have a floppy disk and am trying to make this as self-contained as possible - I don't plan on using the cardbus slot on my new laptop.

This is a fairly impressive flash card:
http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/index.html#cs_TS8GCF266.html
266x, which gets 45MB/s, my laptop drive averages 39MB/s. My current laptop has space for another SATA drive(which would need ANOTHER adapter to make it work with the flash card), but my X61s probably won't have any room at all.