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Thread ID: 100848	2009-06-23 00:06:00	Use 16GB SD Card as OS hard drive?	supersi (8401)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
784786	2009-06-23 00:06:00	I've been thinking about utilising a 16GB SD Card as my OS hard drive. I don't know if it's worth it or not. However I'm way to poor to go and buy a 120GB + SSD. I would like to use the current 120GB SATA drive onboard simply for storage and not for the OS. Can this be done? 1. What's the fastest class SD card? What sort of read/write performance will I get compared to a 2.5" 4500rpm SATA drive? 2. Is it easy to format these as NTFS? 3. Will/how do I get my laptop to recognise the SD card as the bootable drive, any issues there?	supersi (8401)
784787	2009-06-23 00:12:00	1.Fastest class of SD is class 6. You'd want to get a good one, like the sandisk series that are ~200 2. YES 3. What brand is it? Toshiba comes with an SD boot utility. There's a lot of info on this on the eeeuser forums. I can post some links here if you want Blam	Blam (54)
784788	2009-06-23 01:15:00	Incredibly slow is one thing. Lowest class 6 spec is 6MB/s going up to 45MB/s on the most expensive cards. A HDD would do 45MB/s at worst.	trinsic (6945)
784789	2009-06-23 01:18:00	I looked at doing this for the HTPC I was going to build, and plenty of people warned me off doing this, for the simple fact that Windows does HUGE amounts of writes to a drive during everyday use, and it's simply too much for an SD card to handle long-term. SSD's are another mater entirely of course!!	nofam (9009)
784790	2009-06-23 01:31:00	I looked at doing this for the HTPC I was going to build, and plenty of people warned me off doing this, for the simple fact that Windows does HUGE amounts of writes to a drive during everyday use, and it's simply too much for an SD card to handle long-term. ^ x2 - you'll kill it pretty quickly.	Erayd (23)
784791	2009-06-23 01:40:00	^ x2 - you'll kill it pretty quickly. Interesting you should say that. We have had Voicemail systems for the past 8 years running on flash cards. Apart from the first couple of years where there was a slite failure ratem, the past 5 years have been very reliable. Voicemail systems by their very nature do lots of read / write cycles..	paulw (1826)
784792	2009-06-23 02:01:00	Voicemail systems by their very nature do lots of read / write cycles..Except they don't - the read / write load of voicemail files is negligible compared to the load of running a standard OS, unless that OS has been seriously tweaked to avoid disk writes. The biggest culprit on Windows systems is the pagefile - that causes a massive number of writes to the card, and in most cases will cause it to start failing in a matter of months. Edit: Note that I'm talking about MLC flash here - SLC will last a fair bit longer, but it's also pricey as hell. As a result, almost all consumer flash products are MLC.	Erayd (23)
784793	2009-06-23 02:41:00	I would say give it a crack if you use linux not windows I have a friend who has done this installing ubuntu minimal running xbox media center and he has seen a 30% decrease in boot time but the actual running once it is going has no performance decrease whatsoever... Plus it is on a 2gb usb stick so if it dies he has an image and will just bang in a new one	Gobe1 (6290)
784794	2009-06-23 03:14:00	I would say give it a crack if you use linux not windows... provided that you don't put a swap partition on it, /tmp and /var/tmp are in ram or on another device, and ideally all of /var is elsewhere too. If you use either Gnome or KDE, then the same comment applies to the per-user settings directories for those - both desktop environments perform very frequent writes to lots of small files there.	Erayd (23)
784795	2009-06-23 04:26:00	If you can do it like DSL or Puppy and have the whole thing boot into and run in RAM, not only will you have 0 card writes you'll also have a very fast system You can also disable the pagefile in windows, but you need a LOT of RAM	Agent_24 (57)
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