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Oops PATA(40 Pin not 50) is here. got the other link wrong.

The other option is a compact flash to IDE adapter. They come in SATA or PATA (50 pin)

The other option is a compact flash to IDE adapter. They come in SATA or PATA (50 pin)

>> There must be something very unusual with that drive. You get 1GB Flash parallel IDE disks for about $45.

> Really? Link me, I'd like one.

http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp?Page=/Page s/Products/CompactFlash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm

So add in a $25 1GB compact flash, e.g. http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4174273?site=sr:S EARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG and you're within a few dollars.

In a corporate world, most users should have nothing but a thin client (without USB or FireWire ports). Not only can nothing be installed, but they can't "appropriate" any data, either, if the email outbound filtering is working. Data loss when a desktop crashes is minimal-to-none, with the data on an IT-maintained server. Thin clients CAN be built from diskless boot PCs, but it is often simpler to just buy them than do the research to figure out exactly which packages to build into an initrd image to support your corporate app's. It used to be possible to build diskless M$-Windows systems, but I won't have XP, so I don't know the limitations of it's ramdisk. One trick we used to use on di*kless Sun workstations after disk prices came down was to use a disk for /tmp and swap, rather than the networked drives. 'Could probably be done today with some CompactFlash socketed into an IDE port (something like this: http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp?Page=/Page s/Products/CompactFlash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm).

It's quite easy you just hook up a compact flash card to an adapter. You can use any old compact flash and adapters from places like http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp?Page=/Page s/Products/CompactFlash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm
  No extra power required and it fits in a 2.5 inch drive bay.

In TFA, they don't say what the seek time of this device is. I mean, if I got one of these 2 Gb things (16 giga BITS, right?), and put it in my compu with one of these and boot off of it, will that be faster than the fastest possible magnetic hard drive (those 30000 rpm Seagate SCSI's)?

You could boot from a solid-state drive, and store all your media files on a noisy server somewhere else. Then your only problem is the local optical drive. You could do without the optical drive if you've already got a stand-alone DVD/etc. player, and now you're silent. I haven't tried booting from a flash drive on a windows system, but it should be possible. One of these http://www.acscontrol.com/Pages/Products/CompactFl ash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm will turn your CF card into an IDE drive, or use an all-in-one DiscOnChip http://www.tri-m.com/products/msystems/ffd35ideplu s.html. It doesn't require drivers, so one should be able to install any OS on it.

You could even retrofit your Zalman PC, and poof! now your TiVo is the loudest thing in the living room.

Whadaya mean?

One of the nice things about Compact Flash is that it was designed to work on an IDE bus. That means that with a cheap, simple
adapter, that compact flash card is now an IDE hard drive.

As for keeping the system state, don't power off, use "suspend-to-RAM".

steve

Why bother with a USB memory stick when you get can CF card->IDE adaptors? Here's one outfit that sells an adaptor that works for desktop computers.

I'm sure adaptors for laptop drives exist. If not, one could easily be built--it's a simple matter of changing the connector type, because CF cards have a built in IDE compatible interface!

Lately i've been rearing my ugly head at this page. The author has schematics for interfacing it to the LPT port, as well as software examples. I built my own interface using a rapid prototype board.

For those too scared to venture into building the interface themselves, I found this unit for less than $20 bucks from a company called ACS out in Florida. Unfortunately due to economic conditions, I cannot even afford that, but great looking product guys.

$500 is tooo much, i'd rather just interface steppers through the LPT and save an extra $380.

I was also going to suggest some lego's or erector sets as a platform for the
stepper motors, but then I came across this link
to a company called 80/20 that makes Industrial Erector Sets.

So for $20, a few broken floppy drives (for stepper motors), an Erector set
and an old computer, you can give this guy the building blocks he needs to build
his own robots. Right now mine runs from an old Pentium 133 laptop in dos.
It may not be cutting edge but controlling real world objects by programming
your computer is a great way to get someone's wheels spinning. If you really want this thing expensive, get the guy the "Industrial Erector Set" peices and the latest greatest Athlon PC.

IDE to Compact Flash Adapter

Flash Storage Solutions

Read all this thread if you will be storing sensitive information

How Compact Flash can keep your data safe?

This guy has an opinon different from mine. He says that, all of a sudden, he lost hundreds of picture. Well, I've been working with Compact Flash for more than one year, now, and the ONLY time I gost corrupted data was when I took the card off the camera while it was writing. Then the camera could not read any picture. They seemed to be lost. But later I put that CF in my CF reader, and ran a chkdsk. It found lost chains, that I saved as files. And recovered ALL pictures except for the bottom half of the one it was writing at the very moment when I removed the CF. It probably corrupted the FAT (same way as hard disks, when the computer is not properly shut down).

And I do think CF is more reliable than Microdrive.

Embedded Linux mag used to have micro ( smaller than mini-itx ) motherboard from ZFLinux.com, but now they sell system-on-chip thingys, so maybe that'd be a bit too much hacking...

here's one 2.7 inches by 1.6 inches, it has an IDE interface and a 486sx...

Ah HA! Gotcha!
LinuxDevices.com:Top:Hardware:Boards:Single-board computers HERE.

Right, so that takes care-of the motherboard, so to use a flash-card or micro-drive, you need either anATA-to-CF adapter,
or, if you need more than a pair of 2GB CF cards, maybe one of these flash-disks ( ATA, SCSI, PC/104? that's what the ZF boards were called! ),
or you can get an all-in-one IDE MicroFlash Card from MagicRam.com,
or dig Dan's Data's review of the VME CF-IDE adapter ( neat that it can run as either ATA-master OR ATA-slave, unlike the competition, so you could get 4GB of 'drive', or RAID-1 2GB, it's what I'd choose, if they do actually do this... ).

Then get a Lexar CF-card ( up-to 6MB/s, no motor ), up to 1GB 32x or 2GB 40x, or put a MicroDrive on it, and you'll have a VERY mini machine you can FTP to ( probably be able to stick Gentoo on it, if going for a 486-SoC ), if you have to limit everything for power, you may need to limit the amount of RAM on it, when it's in its final config...

Just ideas, I don't do this stuff day-in-day-out, so I don't know how you'd get it connected to your magnetic-instrument, but I hope this helps..

But I always hoped that compact flash cards replaced floppies.

How about for your IDE drive? Something like this.

Use a flash memory to IDE converter like this.

Then you realize flash memory costs more per MEG than hard drives per GIG and is SLOW.

Skip the fancy stuff unless you are just looking for toys.