Following on from my last post, I was reading round various sites and had something of a brainwave.

The intel mobo I'm using has a single IDE channel. Now, I'm not going to use it as all my stuff will be SATA but it did get me thinking.

If I get an Compact Flash to IDE converter (EBuyer do them for about £15) and a decent speed 4GB CF card could I use it as the system partition for my server running XP?

I've never even thought about doing this before so am relatively clueless. Everything I've read suggests that it would work in theory but I want to know if a. if would be fast enough and b. I've heard that flash doesn't like lots of reads/writes so could I run XP with no page file?

Any thoughts?

Sounds like it should work, the speed of the flash card could be slowed by the IDE bus (though no idea of figures so may be wrong).
Flash cards never used to like lots of writes, this could be different now. With regards to the page file, you could stick it on another drive if it did need it? But otherwise with enough RAM you should need it (It might make some things slower if you don't have enough RAM).
My concern about putting system files on such a small drive would be a case with updating the system, could the install size grow with new updates/service packs?

I've always wondered why we didn't install OS's on a cartridge on a socket on the mobo...

In theory, it's possible but it certainly won't be quick.

Flash still doesn't like lots of writes but most SSDs write randomly to different sectors (all have the same performance) in order to prolong life. I don't think compact flash cards do this but I could be wrong.

I've done it before but the CF card will die quite quickly.

For my media server I installed 3x 1tb drives in a RAID 3 array to give me 2GB of space and put the OS on a partition.

The read / write thing is the reason why I was thinking of running with no page file.

All I was going to do was use something like nlite to create a stripped down XP install to act as a file and music server. My thinking was that I could configure the physical hard disks to sleep after half an hour of inactivity - if I place the page file on these then this won't happen will it?

Even with no pagefile set Windows will still use one (although it puts it in random places)

If you're just going to be using it for storage you could use freenas instead of XP