Anyone have experience with Transcend 2GB (or more) IDE Flash Drive (2.5 / 44pin)

[indessen]

Hello,

does anyone have any experience, good or bad (hopefully good!), with
the Transcend 2GB (or more) IDE Flash Drive (2.5 / 44pin). I am
thinking of buying a 2Gb version for my laptop and install Windows XP
on it with Word etc. and run it as a "surf, research and type/write"
machine with zero noise emission while writing my thesis.

I've managed to strip down an IBM OEM Windows XP to about 1,2 Gb. If I
install Word etc., it might go up to 1,5 Gb. I dont need a lot of file
space and I'll disable the swap file (virtual memory). 2 Gb should then
be more than enough, right? if not, I can always install an
off-the-shelf XP, with XP-lite I managed once to get it down to 600Mb.

According to Transcend these flash disks last for up to 100,000
write/erase cycles. That should last for two years of using Word,
Endnote and Internet explorer?

Anyone have any experience whether this is realiable or prone to
disaster?

Thanks,
Louis

 

[Paul Rubin]

According to Transcend these flash disks last for up to 100,000
write/erase cycles. That should last for two years of using Word,
Endnote and Internet explorer?

Anyone have any experience whether this is realiable or prone to
disaster?

HP made a flash-based configuration of a Windows 3.11 machine called
the Omnibook 300 a long while ago and it worked fine.

There's an 8GB version of that Transcend IDE flash disk available from
newegg.com, of that's of any interest.

 

[Impmon]

does anyone have any experience, good or bad (hopefully good!), with
the Transcend 2GB (or more) IDE Flash Drive (2.5 / 44pin). I am
thinking of buying a 2Gb version for my laptop and install Windows XP
on it with Word etc. and run it as a "surf, research and type/write"
machine with zero noise emission while writing my thesis.

Sounds nice, I might consider that one for my old 200MHz laptop with
Windows 98 if the cost were reasonable, flash drive are defiantly
lighter, power efficient, and cooler than hard drive. I can get CF
card in 2GB range for about $100 and a CF to IDE adapter for under
$10.

 

[indessen]

Sounds nice, I might consider that one for my old 200MHz laptop with
Windows 98 if the cost were reasonable, flash drive are defiantly
lighter, power efficient, and cooler than hard drive. I can get CF
card in 2GB range for about $100 and a CF to IDE adapter for under
$10.

the transcend flash ide 2gb drive goes for around 90 euros in europe
and has a proper controller - apparently - that ensures that the
write/erase areas are spread, as opposed to your usual cf to ide
adapter.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

the transcend flash ide 2gb drive goes for around 90 euros in europe
and has a proper controller

- apparently - that ensures that the write/erase areas are spread,

Compact Flash, IDE, same thing, slitely different interface pinning.
See ATA/ATAPI specs.

as opposed to your usual cf to ide adapter.

Which just routes the copper (signals) properly.
The logic is already on the CF card itself.

 

[Mike Redrobe]

Sounds good, and I did this a while back (on win98, with a 256Mb CF)

You do get silence and instant seek times, but flash is much slower
than HDDs at read/write data transfer. They are better than they
were, but still no match for modern HDDs.

CF is often described as "40x speed", which is a reference to
the original CDROM single speed of 150kB/sec, so
40x speed is 6MB/sec data transfer.

Compare this to an average HDD of 60MB/sec - "400x"