Hey all,
I just tested a Compact Flash (120X / 20MB/s transfer U-TEK Supreme 16GB) card as an IDE drive on my WSeB station.
The good news:It works
The Install Notes:You will require an IDE to CF adapter (cheap on eBay)
You (may) need to disable Busmaster (I needed to) - if you hear a bunch of beeps with it enabled, and your system takes forever to boot (if at all), disable busmaster [shut down machine (CTRL-ALT-DEL if it hangs), unplug CF card, reboot, modify config.sys to disable busmaster for the CF card as noted below].
BASEDEV=DaniS506.ADD /A:0 /U:1 /T:30 /!BM
- /A:0 /U:1 identifies Adapter 0, Unit 1 no busmaster...
- Change /A:0 to /A:1 for secondary CONTROLLER
- Change /U:1 to /U:0 for primary DRIVE
The Bad News:I formatted the drive JFS (after removing the Fat32 partition) and then tried using it as my temp and swap volume.
That much worked fine - BUT, the speed was abysmal. My 160GB IDE drive with 4 partitions (using the last partition - which is JFS - as swap and Temp space outperforms it by a factor of nearly 10).
So, unless it is because the CF unit I have (or the CF to IDE converter, or the motherboard's chipset) does not support busmastering, then I would say that CF would make a nice solution for an embedded device - but that's about it - at least under Warp/eCS.