CF IDE adapters (any way to speed one up)?

[turbofiat124]

So I've been playing around with one of those Compact Flash IDE adapters that plugs directly into the motherboard (no IDE cable), no other device shared on the IDE port, etc.

I'm using a 16 GB compact flash card (I'd have to pull it to get the brand and specs) and an no-name brand adapter I got off Ebay. The computer is a Gateway with a Pentium (R) 4 2.6 GHZ processor and 3.50 GB of RAM. The hard drive failed in this computer and was given to me by a friend.

One reason I am interested in using flash memory in place of a mechanical hard drive is due to the high failure rate of hard drives on computers out in my garage. These were not *new* computers but rather salvaged computers with bad hard drives which I replaced with used hard drives off Ebay. I really don't want to put a really good computer out there in that type of environment (no climate control, spiders, dust, etc.).

It seems whenever there was a power interruption, if I did not restart the computer within a day, I'd get a "Operating system not found" error when I restarted the computer. I've got four PCs under my workbench right now with bad hard drives. So whenever one would fail, I'd just grab another computer.

Anyway I've read using flash memory is not ideal because it tends to "hang up". When I did the initial installation of XP initially on this CF card, everything seemed great at first. No problems, maybe a split second hang up but nothing major.

But XP could not find the driver's for the sound card or the on board Ethernet port. But my friend had installed a Linksys PCI Ethernet card instead of looking for the driver's (I guess) so no problems there.

The sound card is a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 model sb0240 in it. I was hoping to just find the drivers but had to download the installation program.

Anyway, so I installed the two programs with the installation file along with the drivers. The sound card now works but the computer seems sluggish.

Maybe I can uninstall the programs but will leave the driver's behind?

I also installed SP3 which is a known memory hog on anything less with 2 GB of RAM but since I have 3.5 GB of RAM this shouldn't be an issue.

I've noticed that after installing some programs the free space has dropped to 3 GB.

In the past I've noticed that as free space decreases on a hard drive, so does the speed of the computer. The hard drive is always spinning. So I guess the same could apply to flash memory?

One idea is to simple get a larger CF card. So I found a 128 MB card off Ebay for $5.00 with free shipping. Hopefully it will be compatible with this computer. This might speed the computer up.

The other idea is to leave the operating system on the 16 GB flash card and transfer all of the installed programs to a USB memory stick. I don't know if that would speed things up or not.

Would using an SD card be less likely to hang up? I have not tried using SD flash memory.

I haven't had too much success getting older computers to boot directly off USB flash memory sticks even when they recognize them in the BIOS. Particularly older ones with 32 bit systems.

So I'm not interested in installing the operating system directly onto a USB stick.

 

[Rogue Leader]

CF and SD cards are not made to be used like a hard drive. They have a finite number of writes to them before they start to degrade, which is far far lower than that of an SSD which is made to be used like that. Windows with its Virtual Memory and all its other overhead is continually writing to the drive. Even if you got this to be reliable, I would imagine the cards to fail in short order, in fact may be failing already with the Windows install and the installations you are doing.