Comments on: Powerbook compact flash drive

By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 01:18:39 +0000

All current publicly available Flash Drives have an extreme limitation when it comes to writing data. They ‘wear-out’ after a relatively small amount of block writes. Using a flash card in this manner (as a home for the OS) means it will most likely have a lot of write operations performed on the flash drive. Most newer drives try to combat this by distributing data writes as evenly and reasonable as they can. So for all of you out there who think “I can get replace my HD”: you may have be in for a big suprise shortly down the road. VERY nice project nonetheless.

By: nils

nils — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 14:49:58 +0000

I love this hack, I already thought it would be neat to do similar things to other notebooks… way to go man! Really neat.

By: jovan

jovan — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 02:56:28 +0000

sweet hack! have a pb100 as well as a pb160, wondering if this will work on scsi as well. :D

By: Suntiger

Suntiger — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 01:19:34 +0000

You know, for IF, a Palm OS device is a much better bet, especially an old one with a KB, maybe a treo 100/300 or something, seeing as there have been IF engines since POS 3.0 or something like that.

Excellent hack though.

By: ravuya

ravuya — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:19:22 +0000

That’s pretty awesome. Bring on the 68K hacks!

By: Peter clay

Peter clay — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 18:06:49 +0000

I like this a lot – I didn’t think people built circuits out of discrete logic any more, and it hadn’t occured to me to put a CF card in a laptop as a means of building a silent PC.

By: mike

mike — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 11:20:27 +0000

I’ve got a PB100 in the closet, damn keys are too loud..only use for it I ever found was word processing, and some people have used it as MIDI STMP clock…I don’t think the battery keeps a charge. Interesting hack though…

By: anonymous Gort

anonymous Gort — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 06:00:18 +0000

Very nice

By: Top-e5

Top-e5 — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 23:11:08 +0000

By the way excellent idea.

By: Top-e5

Top-e5 — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 23:02:27 +0000

Ok peeps i’m new here…..well been in the shadows for some time. Now i have to come out of the hack shadows, coz i’m a newbie. I have a Ricoh g1200s….could you run an alternative OS with a pcmcia adapter and flash card? Like a removable multi-boot system? Would you have to do the same thing here that jam did. Would like to run a linux distro.

By: BoomBox

BoomBox — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 20:53:05 +0000

Love the hack.

Good detective work on his part with disassembling the code and finding the problem! I would not have opted for the logic chips but a CPLD like a XC9536 but thats me ;-).

Great stuff.

By: david

david — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 10:07:54 +0000

Looking at the schematic, I’m wondering why the designer didn’t just use OR gates instead of using an inverter after every NOR. He could have saved a chip.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 05:52:30 +0000

best suggestion for getting adapters (ide-to-cf, ide-to-laptop-ide, etc) is ebay. price via coyote linux? $60 to $80 US. ebay? $0.99.

By: iamdigitalman

iamdigitalman — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 05:11:47 +0000

yeah, i found this and was thinking of doing it to my PB100, only use it IN ADDITION to the HD. use it to boot off of, like ez said. also, using it as VM might work as well. However, I dont wanna mess around with my beautiful PB100. maybe I should pick up a PB150 on ebay, as they are going for cheap.

of course, I also have a wallstreet on the way, the one without the cache. I could try to put a CF card in it and use it as a cache. if I could get a smaller card, imagine instead of a 512kb cache, try 32mb!! or, wouldnt that work?

-digital ;)

By: ez

ez — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:05:13 +0000

Well I have a powerbook 1400 G3 and I’m thinking about adding a compact flash card to boot off of and add some virtual memory.
Plus I got a 512MB compact flash card for only $15AR.