Booting from PCMCIA Compactflash?

8 GB CF costs around $80 from newegg. Add a CF-PCMCIA adapter for around $10 and you have a super fast, cheap SSD drive.

When I disable hibernation, disable virtual memory (I have 2 GB in my notebook), and move the C:\Documents and Settings\MahirAydin folder to D:\MahirAydin (MS has a kb article telling how to, it is a 5 minute process), my C drive with office 2007 and some apps is about 6 GB.
Can I just make the 8GB PCMCIA CF my C drive, which will reside on the PCMCIA slot that I dont use in my notebook, and for everything else I can use the D drive, which is the 2.5" HDD in the notebook? This sounds very doable, only if XP supports booting from PCMCIA CF, which I couldn't get much info on by googling. Would there be many rewrites (ruining the CF) on C, if there was no swap file and the user profile folder was in a different drive?

I think that would be the best of both words for now, cheap cost and I believe windows booting times and general responsiveness would increase.
Anyone try it?

I Have an Asus A8JS, and I would love to put the PCMCIA slot to good use if this would work well.

 

i dont know if what you want to do can be done or not, it depends if the BIOS can boot up the PCMCIA adaptor, and realize there is a CF card in it, and also beable to read the boot information on the CF card. i have a built in CF card reader, and i had a similar idea, except i only had a 1 gig card, and i wanted to poot a bootable linux on it, i tried, but my bios dosent use the CF reader until windows is loaded, and has microsoft drivers powering the reader.

and i think it'd be a similar case for your PCMCIA reader/and card. Also keep in mind you will need to find a way to make the CF card bootable, i've seen a guide on making a thumb drive bootable - by making a system floppy disc, then copying the format over to the thumb drive and changing some of the numbers in command prompt, i havent tried it, but do a google search for bootable thumb drive, or something; and find out if your laptop can boot anything from pcmcia.

 

Unfortunately, it isn't that simple.

If you buy a $10 PCMCIA CompactFlash adapter, chances are it's the slow pass-through kind. They work, but very, very slowly - the maximum speed you'll see out of that is about 1MB/sec. It would be the total opposite of a fast SSD drive. Even if you did buy a 32-bit adapter for the slot, which costs around $30-40, with only a single CompactFlash card you'd still be booting up slower than you would with the hard drive, because the throughput would still be much slower than your hard drive - probably much less than half, despite having a better access time... and you'd still have to solve the issue of BIOS support for booting to the adapter, which isn't likely with one of these.

 

I have read about some ppl trying to do that with a compact flash adapter. I have also heard that it is also slow, slower than a 4200 rpm, due to different speed of read/write of compact flash.

 

The bios supports usb booting, but I don't think the PC card reader is classified as a usb device. I guess this idea is a no-go.
How about readyboost in vista, does it just use the flash as the swap file, which really isn't that useful if you have enough ram, or does it actually use the flash as a hard drive cache, which would be very useful.

 

Hi,
we are discussing this subject on the 'DIY SSD' thread... (maybe we should move the PCMCIA specific discussion here? )