This Ideai has been running though my mind for I while now. I'm building a midia center and was thinking of getting rid of the harddrive and run windows off of a usb key. I would like to even try and build a RAID of usb flash drives to store music and videos on. I've searched the web and found that you can install XP on a usb key. the think is I'm not sure how well it would work under the conditions, I would also like to know if anyone has anything to say on the topic of uning an os like this and for RAIDing usb keys.
linux is more forgiving and gives a better solution... get DSL and mythTV. Raiding USB keys might work, but why not just stick a few 2.5" laptop sata drives in it??
Another option would be to use a 4gb compact flash card and an IDE adapter for it. Gives you the diskless solution, but also gives you decent HDD access times. Although mythtv is a great media portal. I would still have to recommend MCE2005. With the updates MS has pushed out, it really makes it an enjoyable media center program. Setup is also a breeze. Should fit just within a 4gb CF card too.
It's going to be hideously expensive if you're just going to be using flash drives for your audio/video. I don't use my media center that much and I've got a few hundred gigs of crap on it.
its also practically impossible to get windows running of a usb drive too i have tried before. Linux can though
I was thinking of keeping the noice down and I wanted to try something with solid state memory. The media center would be getting most of its stuff over the network. Ony the OS, players, and commonly played items would be stored locally. The raid was a fun thought because USB flash memory is coming down in price nicely. I have also heard compact flash doesn't last long when used as a hdd.
The USB keys I was looking at appears to run at around 24 MB per second read/write. CF says to read/write at 40 MB per second. but as I said before I've heard CF doesn't last when used as a HD.
I wouldnt think a usb key is any more durable data wise than a CF card. And even so. You would only be using it for mostly read access and not mostly write access. And even so... a 4gb CF card is mad cheap and by the time it fails (if it ever does) think of how cheap it will be at that time. You could keep an easy 4gb backup of the OS that makes up the media box. I would not trust USB as a technology to boot off of. IDE is a proven standard. The way I see it. If USB was such a great idea for booting, why do next to no devices boot from USB.
