Almost a year ago, I decided to try and setup a low power, 'diskless' cruncher. This lead me to SETI, and other ground breaking DC projects. After more searching and thinking, I settled on BOINCpe (this was the easy route). I wanted something that anyone could setup in an afternoon, with an existing computer. This is a 'live CD' OS (based on XP), that you can add DC software to.
Anyway. I did the BOINCpe CD thing, and this lead to booting my BOINCpe crunchers from a USB drive. No HD, CD or Monitor, Built on a Low power AMD CPU (65w).
Well, USB drives are ok. And there are all kinds of information on their longevity (good and bad). There are longevity issues with CF cards also, But the longevity (as with other 'chip' based media) seems to be based on the 'write' cycles. And, then there are different types of memory.......stuff for another day.
Why not try CF cards!!
I looked around a little. And found that to boot a CF card, it had to be able to operate like an IDE drive (And therefore operate in PIO mode). And it seems, not all CF cards are created equal, from the information I could find. I did not run out and try a bunch of CF cards to verify this. I actually had a CF card of dubious pedigree that I could not get to boot.... So, I just looked around for a CF card that was listed as IDE PIO capable:
Transcend 2 gig (1 card for ~$30.00 US)
Support IDE PIO mode 6, Ultra DMA mode 4
Compliant with the CF4.0 specification
Built-in hardware ECC technology
Built-in ATA interface for easy Plug and Play interoperability
266X
40MB/sec(Max)
Lower power consumption
And I am using an: Addonics IDE to CF adapter. Model: ADIDECF (I bought 2 adapters for ~$30.00 US)
This stuff worked right out of the box! I just installed the software as if installing to a real HD. And it works great! I am using this card to boot my FreeNas file server. The actual OS for the file server is only about 64 Mb, and there is not a lot (if any) writes to the CF card in this application. But the card boots fine, and works like a champ.
My next step is to boot a cruncher....
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