IDE Flash Drives

[godot]

I've found a few web pages for manufacturers of ide flash drives (flash cards with ide parallel interface that act like a hard drive). They come in 16-32-64-128 MB flavors and I am extremely interested in them. Does anyone out there have any experience wtih these drives? If so: Do you find them more reliable? Does linux work with them? Any places where I can buy them?

[mdwatts]

I've seen other members post questions about using the USB flash drives. Those will work if you have the correct usb modules loaded. usb-storage etc.

For a parport ide drive, you most likely need the parport and parport-ide support either built into your kernel or compiled as modules.

#
# Parallel port support
#
CONFIG_PARPORT=m
CONFIG_PARPORT_PC=m
CONFIG_PARPORT_PC_CML1=m
# CONFIG_PARPORT_SERIAL is not set
CONFIG_PARPORT_PC_FIFO=y
CONFIG_PARPORT_PC_SUPERIO=y

#
# Block devices
#
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_FD=m
# CONFIG_BLK_DEV_XD is not set
CONFIG_PARIDE=m ** THIS ONE **

[godot]

I meant something more like this. (http://www.pretec.com/index2/product/SSD/ata_AFH.htm)

[michaelk]

Compact flash cards will be more reliable in the sense that there no moving parts to fail. I have only seen them used them in embedded applications but should work on PC's and linux too.

As an example check out this site www.embeddedx86.com.

[TomSi]

I have work with a ide interface CF reader, it just work like a ide hard drive, what we shoudl do just mount it to my linux system. and we have a client system on the CF card.