Copy Cat

02Oct10

Ok, so perhaps I’m being a bit of a copy cat, but really, this seemed like such a good idea that I couldn’t resist.

Yup, an 8GB Compact Flash card, and a 2.5″ CF-to-IDE adapter. €23 for the lot. Add one laptop, and you’ve got a poor man’s SSD It’s cooler, lighter, faster, and hopefully more durable than a harddrive.

It’s replacing a 30GB IBM Travelstar harddrive, so it’s quite a step down on space. Which means that finally, I’m forced to actually have a really light system, which generally I don’t. It’s currently running Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick, and still has all of Gnome installed, the behemoth that it is

That said, I’m working on getting rid of it, bit by bit, leaving behind just an Openbox setup, with just enough of Gnome for the applications I need.

As for speed, I havn’t really compared boot times or the like. Large applications like Firefox and Openoffice open quite a bit quicker, and there’s little lag when opening a directory full of images or the like in Nautilus.

Getting the card and adapter connect to the actual machine wasn’t so easy though. The harddrive comes in a little tray, which slides into the side of the laptop. Getting the adapter to line up and connect with the IDE header took a bit of time and patience. And once it was in, the only thing holding it there were the pins. Which kinda worries me to be honest. I’m not sure just quite how robust that’s going to be. Perhaps I’ll make some sort of caddy for it. Perphaps

So far, the CF card has been running fantastically. And thanks to K.Mandla’s rigorous testing, I expect it to stay that way. I won’t be running out of write cycles in this lifetime

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