Nightcrawler wrote:
Yes, on the A1200, but is it possible on the new HW?
Yes, something like 99.9% of storage CF cards on the planet support use as good ol' IDE devices. You'll need an adapter off eBay or similar, and you won't be able to (safely) hotplug it while the machine is on.
Hotpluggable adapters exist, but these are 1. not likely to be supported by U-Boot (at least, not just yet), 2. not likely to be supported by anything but Windows. Until someone in Linux/BSD/Amiga land buys one and goes through the trouble of puzzling out the chipset(s) involved and writing supporting drivers, anyway.
Putting most of the system stuff on the CF, and everything else on a drive on a nice power-saving timer could be a boon. If you can afford it, using RAIDed/mirrored CFs (given the concerns about reliability after many writes) for your applications might not be a bad idea, either. It's generally-accepted that using one for swap (with an OS that can swap) will kill it after a month or three, but a lot depends on the particular architecture of the flash chips inside - something based on Strataflash is probably going to be less reliable than 'regular' Flash or Mirrorbit, not that I'm sure if *any* of those technologies make it into the chips used on CF cards.
Sadly, the only way to conclusively determine the make of a card would be to pry it open, and most packagings don't allow that to be an easy or reversible operation. (I've never done it, but I imagine probing IDE device IDs would return the make of the CF/IDE interface chip on the card, but not the make of the Flash chip itself. Even if you pry it open, people counterfeit the printing on RAM chips, so there's no reason to ####ume the same can't happen with Flash; the memory market is as or more absurd than everything else in technology.)
With Pricewatch claiming $47/256MB, RAIDing could be slightly less than absurd.
