CF card as hard drive?

[Generale]

yeah, me again.

I noticed on ebay last night a flood of IDE to CF adaptors.

At the time I was thinking "Ooh, that would be nice for my PC" even though I have a USB reader...Then it hit me.
Something like that would be perfect for a small storage solution for an Amiga where internal space is at a premium. Especially if the person is willing to put a small slot in their case so they can exchange drives  :-)

Only thing is, I have no idea if they require drivers, because the connection appears to be pretty much straight-through.

Any thoughts?
Anyone tried it or know if it will/won't work?

[Generale]

Cool. Thanks for the replies.

I have horrible luck with hard drives. I was considering it myself. It looks to be a nice cheap alternative. Mostly because I don't have a massive amount of data to store anyway. Just DP and some utils really.

[Generale]

heh. I didn't even contemplate hot-swapping to be honest.
I'm the sort of person that can swap hard drives in a PC up to a few times a day. And tend to rearrange hardware on average weekly.

That reminds me...how many of you out there have hotswapped ISA cards in old PCs? I discovered years ago I'm not the only one. Talk about tolerant hardware. Anyhow, that's way off topic.

As for microdrives. If I got hold of one of them it'd go straight into a Fujitsu Stylistic 500 I have. Odd machines, but strangely cool.

[Generale]

Too tired to format this properly. Sorry. But,

The stylistic has 2 pcmcia for normal use and 1 doublewidth for microdrives if I remember correctly.

Now for the bad blocks.
Are you saying that microdrives are smart enough to implement the same sort of system as S.M.A.R.T. Ie, having some capacity put aside for bad sectors that is dynamically remapped, and after that threshold has been hit, 'Sorry but you have bad sectors'. Anyway, I don't see how it could be too much of a problem, because as long as the CF card has the ability to say 'this byte is bad', the filesystem handles the bad blocks anyway.

I just had a stupid idea that I shot down instantly. Just thought I'd say it because some people might get a laugh out of it. My logic went as follows:

*CF would wear out too quickly if used for swap.
*What doesn't have the writing limitations?
*RAM doesn't!
*So use a Ramdisk for virtual memory!!
*.....idiot.

[Generale]

Yeah. S.M.A.R.T. is just a buzzwordused by seagate. what they do is nothing unusual. On my 'big' computer that my partner uses I always keep an eye on the s.m.a.r.t. status in linux, but not too closely, as I dont trust it. Did you know that the drive thinks that it has problems when the data connector isnt 100%? learned that the hard way with a bad caddy.

Heh. I remember trying to make my pc use a ramdisk for the swapfile years ago. the computer had three hundred and something meg of ram and barely touched most of it and still used a swap. Needless to say, it didn't work.

Oh, back to the whole intelligent sector remapping thing, i like to know when somethings going wrong. Unless you use a system like smart, the drive hides it, like winnt glosses over drive errors with NTFS.

Never occurred to me about the bad sector map corrupting. Scary thought but could be mangled back with a hex editor.

[Generale]

ouch! looking at that price I think I'd prefer RAID 0!

Just remembered. Upgrading this garbageheap from a 6x86 120+ to a p200mmx. System is shutting down now....