Hard drive in a shaky environment?

[scaryjim]

I wonder if you could find a way of installing the OS, or most of it, on the pen drive too?

Given most modern PCs will boot off USB, I strongly suspect that this might be possible, and a 16GB USB pen drive is relatively cheap nowadays. If your motherboard has spare USB headers I'd be tempted by one of these babies...

[mikerr]

Given most modern PCs will boot off USB, I strongly suspect that this might be possible, and a 16GB USB pen drive is relatively cheap nowadays. If your motherboard has spare USB headers I'd be tempted by one of these babies...

Wow, didn't know such a thing existed...bought

Would be even better if there were a usb drive on that type of usb header.

[scaryjim]

They are kinda cool.

I think the issue with using a pin header for a USB drive is that it'd only take up one row of pins. Now, if someone could make one that was dual channel using 2 USB ports to transfer the data, *that* would be cool...

EDIT:

Doing a bit more thinking, there are other possibilities: an 8GB CompactFlash card + IDE or SATA Adapter could be bought for ~ £30, and Scan currently have the 32GB OCZ Onyx for £62 (yup, < £2/GB!)

[Pob255]

Only problem is some of the 16gb memory sticks are actually quite slow, a faster 4gb might be better you should be able to put the os and the couple of bits of software on there. (an old corsair voyager GT would be idea)
data such as music can then be moved onto a 2nd cheaper slower bigger memory stick.

[scaryjim]

I did a bit more hunting and found a few SATA and *lots* of IDE CF adapters for £5 or less, and ebuyer do an 8GB CF card for £15, so for < £20 you can set yourself up an 8GB solid state boot drive on either IDE or SATA (which would therefore be pretty much guaranteed to work). Probably worthy of consideration...

[smargh]

CF & SD cards have a very limited number of writes and are not suitable for running an OS.