Flash based boot drive?

I am sitting looking at my CF-27 and I was wondering what I could possibly do. I looked at my PCMCIA slot and wondered if I could use that. I see that Ebay has PCMCIA/Compact Flash cards and 8GB Extreme IV cards for less than $40. I know that that is big enough for an OS and a few apps, but how would I go about making my CF27 Mk4 boot from the PCMCIA? I know that flash memory eats the lunch of any HDD on read, power consumption and lifespan. I'm not sure about write operations. Can anyone give me an idea if this is an option? I'm pretty sure this would be feasible. Just want the hows and the question of practicality.


Oh, yes. I want to use the existing HDD as an archive drive.

Just tossing this out there.

 

As far as i know this was discussed before and none of the toughbooks can boot from the PCMCIA slot.

You could possibly use a HDD IDE to CF adapter and run the card instead of the HDD but i think this would not give you that good of results.

Search the forum this was discussed somewhere.

-James

 

James is correct
No pcmcia boot option
Write is very slow anyways on cf storage
Best bang for the buck on your cf-27 is a standard hard drive replacement
That is if you still have the 4200rpm standard hard drive

Alex

 

i saw the discussion from last December. I thought that there might have been some good changes in the past year. What about boot from USB 2.0? Any options here for more modern toughbooks?

 

The models that I have that allow booting to a usb flash etc
cf-18 mk-5 1200mhz
cf-19 mk-1
cf-74 mk-1
cf-30 mk-2

All of these have very good boot drives
I don't see a upgrade untill you go all the way with a high end SSD
like the samsung that I have in the cf-30


Alex

 

Good Info Alex... Thanks for posting that!