[Coco] 2gig CF card killed

[John Guin]

Roger,

I've been testing flash devices as hard drives at work for performance
related metrics.  On a sort of related note, many apps actually run slower
on flash drives.  They tend to write frequent, small changes to the drive in
order to save data.  This has the two unexpected affects on flash devices.
First, since they have to perform a block read before writing any data, they
don't get the speed increase solid state would seemingly provide.  Second,
any app which uses a swap file (including the OS) can very quickly burn out
a flash device.

(Vista ReadyBoost actually accounts for this and limits writes.  A typical
swap file from Windows/Linux/Unix would not.)

Does OS-9 use a swap file?  If do, is there any way to limit it writing to
the drive?  And if it doesn't use a swap file, then I feel pretty
comfortable saying the flash device would outlast the Coco itself.

John Guin

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
Behalf Of Roger Taylor
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 10:05 PM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: [Coco] 2gig CF card killed

Well, I think I've successfully killed a nice Lexar 2gig CF card after many
attempts of installing Windows 98SE on it to run on my Compaq IA-1 internet
appliance.

The IA-1 was hacked through software by replacing the internal 16mb sandisk
(originally stocked with MSN Companion, a browser system) with Midori Linux.
Since the unit can also boot from the CF slot, a FAT-16 formatted card made
bootable and with MS-DOS system files would boot into MS-DOS, and if Windows
98 was installed on the FAT-16 card, it would boot as well.

I was trying different install methods, first putting the Win98SE CD
contents on the MS-DOS bootable CF card, then running setup.exe from the DOS
prompt on the IA-1.  This worked perfect up until it kept locking up far
into the install when the plug and play detection was happening.  Then I
installed WIndows on the CF from my PC with the CF card connected as IDE
drive 0, primary, using an IDE to CF adaptor.  This worked great and Windows
and the PC both thought it was a real drive.

I did so many installs and formats, that I think I reached the ~300,000
erase/write limit of the card.

My question is, with the IDE interfaces in use and people using CF cards as
their main CoCo HD, how long would you expect the card to make it as a hard
drive knowing that the cards were designed with a limited number of writes
possible, and also when the card reaches this point, is it readable-only
then?  Mine can't even be accessed now.

It seems to me that more and more people are trying to use CF cards as hard
drive solutions for embedded systems and even for their computers.  This has
got to be the business to get into?  :)  Think about it, they've designed a
card that really shouldn't be any different than a memory stick in what they
do (store memory and read it), but for some reason the CF's have a dying day
somewhere in the future, sooner or later, depending on your use.  They know
very well that people are trying to use them as hard drives on various
systems, and that unless it's an embedded solution like Windows has done
with a version of CE to limit the # of commits to the card, it's a dead card
the day you buy it.  I don't think they're worth messing with.