Minimalist Setup

[Seinken]

I have recently been toying with the idea of building a decent amount of extremely cheap computers to perform the same action all the time, my question is... How viable is a USB Flash drive for a replacement HD? They are cheaper (albiet slower) and much MUCH smaller than hard drives.

Is it even possible to make a windows install on a USB Pen Drive? Keep in mind I already know boot times will be pathetic etcetc, the computers will not be turned off often. Any input would be appreciated.

[JCLW]

You'd probably have an easier time with a compact flash card and a CF<->PATA adapter. This way the CF card would appear as a normal IDE drive to windows.

XP will do it (don't forget to disable the page file), but the mobile version (CE IIRC) is designed for it.

[jcw122]

I'm pretty sure flash cards die after a certain amount of writes.

It might even be cheaper to actually use HDDs, if you consider the cost per gigabyte for flash drives and CF cards.

[Seinken]

Well the thing is, the smallest, cheapest hard drive on Newegg ATM is I believe 39$, I'm trying to cut every single penny I can and also reduce heat at the same time, the computers will all be running in slim micro ATX cases.

I have a 2GB card in mind that is about 17$, I don't believe the flash drives would be doing much reading and writing, the program I wish to run is about 60mb in memory and all the computers will have over a gig of ram, I expect it to be just loaded in memory and go from there...

I did some googling and found information that Windows will have no trouble booting from a Flash drive but when it gets to the desktop Windows will act all wonky because it tries to take control of the USB ports. (or something to that effect)

[jcw122]

How many computers will it be? Mabe you can buy stuff in bulk and get discounts.

[Seinken]

Well first I'm just going to buy a couple I think, and see how well they perform, depending on how well that performs I might buy up to 10 or so.

[TechJunky]

Compact flash cards are about your best bet. We run CF cards with windows CE and they do really well. However, everyone is correct about the writing issue. You can only write a CF card so many times before it kills the card. This is why computers use hard drives instead of CF cards because you are constantly writing to the CF card.

The CF systems that we have setup all run to a network server and push the data to the server, so really no data is being changed/written on the CE machines. They are simply harboring an OS that allows them to run one specific program.

[greenmaji]

Have you considered network booting them?

[Seinken]

I can't say that I've had any experience in doing so, but could it be accessed like any normal hard drive? If it could it would save me electricity, heat output, money... etc etc.

Got any links I could read up on this at?

[greenmaji]

gettocomp did a guide for running "headless/diskless/GFX'less after setup" for F@H and I just dug it up for you :D
http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/diskless.html

[Seinken]

I see... Thanks a bunch! =P

[greenmaji]

no problem..
I don't know if its clear in the guide but you run one machine with a HD as a server for the rest of the machines in the cluster..

[Seinken]

Yeah it seemed pretty straightforward, I was looking back at an old Celeron comp behind me and thinking it'd do just fine for a server job. (pretty easy to tell it used a server considering it had that little client dealy)