[Jim]

I've been looking into solid state drives for my HTPC project (quieter and quicker than normal hard drives) and at the moment the best (read:cheapest) solution seems to be a compact flash to sata card which means I can have a 4gig CF card as the hard drive and will speed up running everything (media files are on network strage).

Anyway, back to photography. This will be a good solution for those using CF media as it is significantly quicker than a normal card reader. They are also hot swapable (ie no reboot). I'm still lookng into which one I need but they come in 3.5" bay mount (floppy drive size), rear PCI slot mount and internal (which I need)

[GCW]

Nice heads up Jim.  I've seen PCI based multicard readers around, not S-ATA.  There's a few 3.5 floppy and multicard combos around, but a bit more costly.
Can you run your OS off a CF drive?  Can't see why not.

[Jim]

you can also p-ata ones as well.
You can run OS off them, thats what I'm getting mine for

[Bubba]

Excellent idea Jim - i'd never thought of something like that for noise reduction.

[cofe]

i'd never thought of something like that for noise reduction.

what does this mean bubs?

[Bubba]

If you run the OS from a solid state card instead of from a hard drive, then there's no hard drive whirring noise

I guess you can run a smaller fan as well, but i might be wrong on that point.

[dave]

when i got my machine i did look at getting a card reader into one of the 3.5" bays (are the really much/any faster than using a USB2.2 speed CF reader? not that these things are slow.), but couldn't be arsed in the end, what with USB card readers being almost free from 7dayshop.co.ck and the like.

[cofe]

yeah my card reader is very fast too.

[Jim]

USB card readers are very slow in comparision

[Johnny Brown]

Jim can't wait ten seconds, he needs it in two!

[GCW]

It is quicker with SATA.  I noticed it mainly when I'd been away for 2 weeks and was downloading 4GB of RAW.  If it's a few pics here and there you probably wouldn't bother about the speed difference.

[cofe]

a few gb of raw doesn't take very long. seems like a lot of faff.

[GCW]

Each to their own Cofe.  It's dead easy to add a SATA CF drive to your PC, but I guess if you already have a USB2.0 card reader there's not a lot of point in uprading.  I prefer to have everything internal if possible, I hate USB leads trailing everywhere.
I'll be interested in how you get on running an OS from CF, Jim-  let us know.

[Jim]

I'm on the look out for a decent, well priced internal reader, then will be putting it in.

Worth noting that a lot of motherboards have eSATA ports on them now which is hotswapable

[slackline]

Don't want to tread on any toes by going off-topic, but I came across this HowTo for installing (yep you guessed it) Linux on CF media here, although it was started in 2003 and the author has indicated that its superseded by official documentation on creating embedded systems.

The whole concept sounds quite interesting, and I may well consider it when (if) I get round to upgrading my home copmuter.

[Jim]

Hopefully SSD drives will of come down by then