OS4 run from "ROM"?

[Nightcrawler]

I was thinking about OS4 and how I'd like my system to be, and I thought about booting and running the OS itself from CF or similar. Would this be possible? I think hardware-wise it wouldn't be a challenge, but the size of the OS might be?

The idea is that it would be totally silent (I don't like the noise from "new" hard drives. They always sound like they're dying to me) so access times and data transfer isn't such a big deal but the faster the better, of course. And that it would be nice to have a separate device for the OS in case of disaster. And backups...

I'd like one of those little A1 lite boards with OS4 running from CF and the HD(s) doing other stuff. At least I think it's a good idea

But is it feasable? Anything I should be aware of?

[iamaboringperson]

I could say somthing trolley... but I wont! ;-)

[Nightcrawler]

I think I know what you mean  :-P  But would it work hypothetically speaking on the alleged OS4?  
 :-D

-edit: I think I saw something about doing it on an A1200 with a IDE>CF adapter or something, does anyone know if that worked?

[Argo]

Yeah, there was a guy that used an IDE to CF interface to replace his 120mb harddrive with an, I think it was, 128mb CF card. He wanted a totally quite Amiga.

[DonnyEMU]

Okay why not just take a CF card adapter for the PCMCIA slot that's already in the 1200 and use that..

-Don

PS I know about 1200's having pcmcia issues, but if you get around the reset issue..

[Nightcrawler]

Yes, on the A1200, but is it possible on the new HW?

[Floid]

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.

[Nightcrawler]

Thanks Floid!

That's exactly what I wanted to know. Off to buy stuff now :-)

I guess I could fit my win98 setup on a cf too, and I have an empty IDE slot, do these adapters work with other drives on the chain (is it called a chain with IDE btw?) as master or slave?

-Sorry if I'm being a pain, I'm just really excited about this-

[whabang]

The Hitatchi 4 Gb microdrive should do...
Dunno how reliable those thigs are, but it's said that they'll survive if dropped on the floor.

[Damion]

Floid wrote:

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.

This is similar to what I am attempting on my
1200 project. The OS, MUI and other often - read
files will go on the CF, whilst all other
apps and most writes will take place on SCSI.

With 5mb/s transfers and little seek time, I'm
anticipating about 3 second boot times.

On modern systems though CF cards may actually
turn out to be rather crippling due to slow
transfer speeds (unless there are faster cards
I'm not aware of), but I'm still looking forward
to trying it out on a Pegasos (when I get one).

-edit-

It seems the "fastest" CF cards are only up
to about 8 Mb/sec read and 6 Mb/sec write
speeds, so copying large files would be very
slow...IMO until the technology improves I'd
say CF should be reserved to boot patitions
and minimal writes...

[Nightcrawler]

Sure, like I would trust someone with that avatar  :-D

It's a little big, and it didn't say but I'm ####uming it has moving parts and that's not quite what I was looking for. But hey, if the price is right... It probably isn't, though.

[Floid]

DonnyEMU wrote:
Okay why not just take a CF card adapter for the PCMCIA slot that's already in the 1200 and use that..

Rather hard to boot from that, isn't it?

(Same problem with the hotplug-capable adapters that go on the IDE chain... While my speculation in past threads has been that those would at least show up as some sort of standard ATAPI? removable device, Linux/BSD users have had some trouble when expecting them to work out of the box, they could easily be something more fiddly, and even if they were easy to support, U-Boot or whatever your boot ROM is would have to know about the standard.)

I defer to anyone with more clue as to whether any form of PCMCIA CF adapter can work on a 1200 at all.

[whabang]

As long as the card is smaller than 4 megs, there should be no problem using it as a bootable drive on an A1200. It is possible to use cards larger than 4 megs in the PCMCIA-port, but it will need special SW to detect it AFAIK.
If a non-hotplug capable IDE-adapter is used, there shouldn't be anyproblem using any card as a drive...

[whabang]

Sure, like I would trust someone with that avatar

What??? :-D

[mikeymike]

(I don't like the noise from "new" hard drives. They always sound like they're dying to me)

A little OT, but "sound like they're dying"?  How?  You might want to consider the Seagate Barracuda IV/V ranges, they run virtually silent (I only hear mine when I'm really pushing it).