Your opinion on Win7 in an SD Card

I have a spare lowly netbook and want to run Win7 from an Class10 8G SD Card; as for *real* storage, it will connect to a NAS. With a wireless keyboard and mouse, I want to attached it to a TV and make a real Smart-TV.

My question is, how reliable will it be? Can it run 24x7? Can the SD Card handle the continuous use?

Has anyone done similar setup?
Or at least run Win7 off an SD Cards or USB Memory Sticks on an extended period?

On another separate but similar matter, is it possible to install a generic Win7 on a USB/SD that can run on any machine? Purpose is as an emergency bootup/rescue.

 

8GB is going to make for a very cramped W7 install; for that limited space I'd look at certain Linux distributions instead.

Another issue is that SD cards don't have wear leveling (which SSDs do), so the limited-write-cycles of flash memory will pose a large problem. I wouldn't recommend putting on OS for serious use on an SD card.

 

Isn't a typical windows 7 install over 20 GBs?

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I believe there are some really trimmed down versions of W7. Look it up, I can't link it here, I think they call it Windows 7 lite edition


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8GB isn't nearly enough. It might get you buy with a basic install BUT I think the Windows installer stops you if you don't allocate at least 20GB. Install any respectable number of programs and you'll easily surpass 32GB.

 

I would advise against this. SD cards and non USB 3.0 flash storage just won't have the necessary read and write speeds to make for an actual usable experience. 8GB of space is also not going to cut it even if you only want Windows 7 and nothing else installed.

 

You can easily trim down a Windows 7 install to fit on an 8GB disk. If you are just using the netbook for word processing, browsing the web, etc, then you will be fine.

The problem with this is the low low speed of SD cards. It will bottleneck the computer. Of course, the first netbooks with SSD's had usually 8 or 16GB's of storage and were pretty much just as slow as a really fast SD card. Also even though 8GB is doable, it is at the extreme end of minimal and will take some hard work to make it function right.

I have two questions. Does the netbook not have any other sort of drive to use or that you could purchase? Chances are it would be much faster than an SD card. Also if you must use an SD card, why not get a larger one? They are extremely cheap.

 

Windows doesn't boot off of USB devices because it power cycles the USB controller during boot. I believe this is changing in Windows 8, but Win 7 probably won't even be able to boot off an SD card, no matter how big or fast.

 

I have stock Windows 7 starter on my netbook and it`s 10-11GB with hibernation disabled, you could also reduce the pagefile size, and maybe compress the drive, but i would not recommend it.

You can buy a 60-64gb SSD for around £50

John.

 

- The main problem here is speed. I wouldn't even try that SD, even if it was 32 GB in size.
I installed Windows 7 on a Sandisk 16 GB USB (18 MB/s read, 8 MB write) using NT 6.x fast installer, link in my sig.

- Using Starter instead of Ultimate won't help much since install size is only 500 MB smaller.

- Windows refuses to install if the partition is about 9 GB or smaller.

- It's possible to make W7 smaller, I got down to 1.2 GB.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=111532

 

Yes, but you have to run sysprep before swapping computer.

 

Really? That much? With all the recent price drops, I'd say you can probably get a good 60-64GB for $50 (USD).
Just today, I saw a 180GB Intel 330 on Buy.com for $120 after MIR

 

As others have said, win7 is not going to run good at all (if it even can run at all) from a SD card.
I think your only hope is a light linux distribution.
You could use linuxliveusb to install linux on a flash drive with persistence enabled which allows you to save settings and install some programs.

check out xbmc, which is a nice addon.
for netbook linux i would suggest Lubuntu, or Xubuntu. these should be compatible with xbmc.
other distros to check might be debian, crunchbang, peppermint, or pinguy.
basically you would want a light distro using a low resource gui.

I don't think win7 allows generic type booting, usually after install its locked into the hardware it was installed on. your best bet is to use a linux rescue cd:

DistroWatch.com: SystemRescueCd