OS X on a flash card

nordstrodamus

With the falling prices, rising capacities, and increasing read/write speeds of compact flash I've been wondering for some time if there would be an advantage to putting some CF in a PC Card adapter in my Powerbook G4 and running the system software from flash.



Obviously, my system (but not user files) would be safe from a hard drive crash, but I'd also think that it would be faster. With the system software I would imagine that the write speed wouldn't be so critical, but a big question is whether the system would use the flash drive only for virtual ram or if it would also use the hard drive used to store user files.



First question, is it doable.

kupan787

Quote:

Originally posted by Nordstrodamus

With the falling prices, rising capacities, and increasing read/write speeds of compact flash I've been wondering for some time if there would be an advantage to putting some CF in a PC Card adapter in my Powerbook G4 and running the system software from flash.



Obviously, my system (but not user files) would be safe from a hard drive crash, but I'd also think that it would be faster. With the system software I would imagine that the write speed wouldn't be so critical, but a big question is whether the system would use the flash drive only for virtual ram or if it would also use the hard drive used to store user files.



First question, is it doable.

Write speed would be important for the VM swap file, but I gues you could have that moved to an alternate drive (instructions exist for that today). Not sure if much of anythign else would be written by the OS (heck there are hacks to make OS X boot off a CD with no write access!)



What is the read speed of a CF reader? Is it faster than the internal HD on the pbook? How fast can a card connected via the PC card slot transfer at? I find it hard to believe that it could be faster, but I might be off.

wizard69

I don't see why this isn't possible. It may not be easy as you don't have the flexibility during the install like you would with Linux. That doesn't mean it couldn't be done just that it would be a bit more work.



As to the question for benefiting from such and install, I would have to say it woulr be a good idea for reliability as long as transient information where stored elsewhere. I'm not sure where read performance would come in, my thiniking is that it would be slightly better.



Thanks

dave

Quote:

Originally posted by Nordstrodamus

With the falling prices, rising capacities, and increasing read/write speeds of compact flash I've been wondering for some time if there would be an advantage to putting some CF in a PC Card adapter in my Powerbook G4 and running the system software from flash.



Obviously, my system (but not user files) would be safe from a hard drive crash, but I'd also think that it would be faster. With the system software I would imagine that the write speed wouldn't be so critical, but a big question is whether the system would use the flash drive only for virtual ram or if it would also use the hard drive used to store user files.



First question, is it doable.

nordstrodamus

Quote:

Originally posted by kupan787



What is the read speed of a CF reader? Is it faster than the internal HD on the pbook? How fast can a card connected via the PC card slot transfer at? I find it hard to believe that it could be faster, but I might be off.

These new cards have read speeds of a minimum of 10 MB/s and write speeds of 9 MB/s min. If you could put two of these in a PC card adapter and stripe them you could get 18 MB/s theoretically. I think the search speeds are a lot faster than hard disks, but don't have the numbers in front of me.

powerdoc

I don't think it's a good idear, even with recent cards, the performances are poor, much slower for r/w than HD. There might be an advantage for latencies, but that's all.



And i am not sure it's technically possible to boot from a PC card.