[wplug] mini-itx and CF booting

[Chris Thomas]

I've put together an epia mini-itx board that boots Gentoo off of a
compact flash card. If you're looing for small, low-power, low-noise,
a fanless epia, like a ME6000 is perfect.

I've also picked up a direct snap-in dc-dc power supply along with a
direct snap-in ide-cf adapter. There's a few places online
(short-circuit.com) that sell these parts.

I'm using it as a movie jukebox where the epia boots directly into
Freevo and mounts my movie collection via nfs. With a few more tweaks,
it will boot read-only mounting the necessary filesystems in a ram
disk.

FYI- Some of the older compact flash cards have a limit on the number
of writes before the card wears out. The newer cards seem to have
overcome this issue.

-Chris

On 12/15/05, Patrick Wagstrom <pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> > I've been working on a mini-itx system. Depending on the environment, you
> > might want the two mediums. Assuming the CF is the root partition, then
> > the HD only data, then it can be removed, possibly on the fly. Or replaced
> > with a different drive with different data.
> > The CF is also less prone to vibration damage, so putting it in a car
> > would work.
> > The CF probably uses less power, so the HD could be powered down when not
> > needed, and the system still retains full functionality (except for data
> > access.)
> >
> > Those are what I can think of off the top of my head.
>
> Another good reason is the extremes of temperature that a computer in
> car faces.  I'm certainly not comfortable with relying on a hard drive
> to work properly when temperatures in cars in Pittsburgh vary from 10
> below to 130 above.  On the other hand, compact flash is basically
> indestructible.
>
> --Patrick
>
>
>
>
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--
-Chris