Hi! This indeed is a fun topic. CF "disks" are supposed to understand IDE and you can have purely mechanical adapters to use them with IDE controllers in your PC. But be aware that CF were originally popular in good digital photographic, so they are tuned towards writing a few, large files during a photoshoot, not for accessing many small files in DOS.
I have tried to use a CF for temp files in Linux 10+ years ago with two goals: Give the mechanical harddisk the opportunity to spin down and save noise and energy and gain some speed. Neither of the goals really worked out. I had to kick a lot of apps and things to stop writing temp files to other places to get any resting periods for the harddisk and the CF often was slower than the harddisk for typical temp file activities, or it had to pause to do some bookkeeping once in a while. So do not expect spectacular results in DOS, but it still is fun to have a small memory card as DOS "harddisk" without big efforts. Well. If your CF properly boots. And if your CF does not self-identify as "could be swapped any moment like floppy disks" or anything like that. So things can still happen which confuse your BIOS or DOS, but it might just as well work :-) Robert has tried a few CF brands recently, so he will probably answer your question with more recent experiences than me :-) Regarding your Linux: On a modern computer, you probably want to use a RAM filesystem for temporary files. But you say you need a lot of swap, so this is probably no option for you. I can predict that if your swap is on CF, your Linux will be at least as slow as it was with a harddisk ;-) I would not worry too much about wearing out the CF: The swap is small compared to the total size of the CF and often it is how much you write in terms of multiples of total disk size which determines how long your flash media will work. Based on Robert's recent comments, I do not think that it will be a problem to acquire enough CF cards, in case you worry to wear them out too soon. If you want something more durable, you could probably invest into SD card adapters, although it will be more indirect - SD does not speak IDE, so the adapter has to have some built-in intelligence, unlike for CF to IDE. I have some adapters which just plug to one end of the IDE cable, but there also are adapters to plug directly into a mainboard. In both cases, you probably also need power, via floppy or harddisk style power connectors for example. You could probably just glue the adapter to some cardboard and stick that to a drive bay so things are not falling around? Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
