From what I've read, I would expect 10MB/s transfer rate. That's pretty slow. I wonder if it would make using Windows, Firefox, and Office unbearable.
But I can buy a 2GB flash drive for $40 (which is cheaper than internal CF drives), and you'd be hard pressed to beat the power consumption and noise level of a flash drive.
Anyone here boot Windows off a USB flash drive?
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booting windows (atleast anything from the windows 2000 base onwards), from USB is a PITA., as the OS sees it as a removable device. CF needs a very cheap adaptor and it essentially is a hard drive to your system.
10MB/s isn't a very impressive transfer rate; u'd probably get that off any (good-ish) random USB disk/ CF card; if u go looking for performance (and it isn't always much more expensive, up to a point) then u can get up to 40MB/s with the aforementioned cards. 20MB/s area is probably more reasonable if u dont want to spend a fortune. many have read/write speed advertised.. the 123x number for the speed of CF is equal to 150kb/s (the same as 1x in a CDrom). Ars Technica has done a couple of round-ups of USB drives re: speed..
also what u lose in sustrained transfer rate you gain in seek time; so transferring large files will be slower (i guess u won't be doing much of that on a 2gb drive), but accessing lots of small files will be quicker. which OS + programs do a lot.
10MB/s isn't a very impressive transfer rate; u'd probably get that off any (good-ish) random USB disk/ CF card; if u go looking for performance (and it isn't always much more expensive, up to a point) then u can get up to 40MB/s with the aforementioned cards. 20MB/s area is probably more reasonable if u dont want to spend a fortune. many have read/write speed advertised.. the 123x number for the speed of CF is equal to 150kb/s (the same as 1x in a CDrom). Ars Technica has done a couple of round-ups of USB drives re: speed..
also what u lose in sustrained transfer rate you gain in seek time; so transferring large files will be slower (i guess u won't be doing much of that on a 2gb drive), but accessing lots of small files will be quicker. which OS + programs do a lot.
mp3car has a faq on the subject: http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=524050
it's important to recognize that you need to run xp embedded or xp will chew up your limited writes in no time.
it's important to recognize that you need to run xp embedded or xp will chew up your limited writes in no time.