Operaing System on Compact Flash Card or Seagate 8Gb Microdrive?

I have been running into some problems with my laptop, in the battery department.
My system gets around 80 minutes even with an undervolted processor, and I want to get more.
My two Hitachi 7K200's in raid draw a combined power of 11watts.

Since my laptop has a PCMCIA port and a Compact flash card slot, I was wondering if I can just buy a compact flash card, put it in the card reader, and boot just XP from the card.

I was looking at either the Seagate 8GB MicroDrive (ST68022CF - It fits in a compact flash port)
http://stores.channeladvisor.com/Digitalet/items/item.aspx?itemid=2093208

or a

4Gb ADATA 266x Compact Flash Card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211163

First of all, can I install an operating system on a compact flash card?
If not, can I just buy the Seagate Microdrive, and install XP on it?

Can I boot from the Compact Flash port in my card reader, or do I have to buy a pcmcia to compact flash adapter?

Which would be faster? - I think the ADATA card
Which would use less power? - I also think the ADATA card

If I set the Bios to just boot from the compact card, (if thats possible), do the internal harddrives get power?
I dont want the harddrives to turn on, so I can maximize battery life.

Has anyone done this before, my Voodoo is based on the Clevo D900K chassis

Any response would be greatly appreciated

K-TRON

 

There probably wouldn't be any difference between a regular CF card and a MicroDrive (same exact interface, which is essentially IDE). You can check what your BIOS supports right now, even before buying the cards. Just examine the options (or the manual). The internal HDD would still get power, but you could probably "put it to sleep" one way or another (OS power settings, I guess). I've never tried this, but it all sounds doable. You should consider the performance and longevity of CF cards though. Regular NAND CF cards would have a limited number of write cycles, so regular OS/app usage would tend to ware them down.
Semi-unrelated though: could it be that your battery is simply worn out and needs replacement? They do tend to lose their "juiciness" over time, so maybe that's what happened to yours? A new battery could be the simplest answer!

 

My battery has 0% wear on it, and it has 96Whr's. Its a very powe hungry desktop replacement, and i wanted to get the most out of it on battery. I would rather lug around my 25lb voodoo then my 5lb dell. My dell unfortunately gets only 2hours on ts 4 cell battery, so I use my portable server for battery tasks.

Life would be so much easier, if AMD made their high end 939 processors power efficient.

The cards I am looking at have 100,000 read write cycles, and supposedly they die within a month or two with xp installed on them.

I like Seagate's idea, but it has a very slow read write.

I think I am going to get a 4Gb compact flash card, it should be enough for my needs. I just have to shut off write caching, page file, hibernation and system restore.

I cant check the Bios on my system since its in pieces. (Its being painted, and I should be getting the painted parts back in a month)

I hope my system can boot to the compact flash port in my card reader. If not I have to buy a pcmcia to compact flash adaptor.

My reasoning for comact flash is that it uses less than 1 watt of power, its silent, and it is way more affordable than solid state harddrives.

K-TRON

 

Is there any alternative compact flash based harddrives which have a higher data transfer speed. 7.5mb/sec is pretty slow?

Its just that the seagate microdrive is $25 and its 8gb and I dont have to worry about it burning out like a compact flash card would.

On the other hand, the compact flash is faster and uses less power.

What should I get?

K-TRON

 

There's SSD's.
But those are expensive... I think I saw a 128GB one going for about 3500 and a 256GB one for about 7000$.

But their fast and much less power consuming. I don't know the exact specs for those ones, but some do have a read/write of 100/80 Mb/s

 

SOmething tells me that would be as slow as anything...