WD and Sandisk 1TB SD Card

[RGB255_0_0]

Thanks for all the help/tips with booting from SD cards.
I've got some SD to USB converter things, so I'll try and boot from them, when I'm next messing with that kind of thing.

Somewhere I had read that you CAN'T boot from SD cards, and that is why I thought you couldn't.

I did know that you can buy devices which let you boot from SD cards (converters). But I read reviews, mentioning that many of them were problematic (if I remember correctly).

Compact Flash, are like IDE hard disk drives, and readily boot. I have got a computer, when it worked (it broke), which had a CF slot and could readily boot from it. It was a very low power consumption, and very small PC. Only about the size of a box of 10 5 quarter inch floppies.

I did know that some servers can boot from SD cards, with special things, built into the server, such as Dell ones.

It means that I can try a few different versions of Linux and stuff, with a handful of cheap SD cards, if I can reliably boot from them. Speed would be really slow, but I can cope with that for test/evaluation purposes.

I know you can get HDD slots, with caddies (like on servers), and external HDD Sata boxes, which let you rapidly slot in HDD's (and SSD's), very quickly.

It is just so cute, cheap and easy to use SD cards. So if those adapters work, that will be very useful.

(My fallback solution is just to use a few USB Flash Pen Drives, but it tends to be a slow way of doing it.).

If you're serious about it, then I would just pick up a cheap 120-ish GB SSD for about £30-40 and a USB 3 to SATA adapter. Not much more expensive than SD cards and will ultimately save you considerable time with transfers, compatibility and boot/RW speeds.

[MK14]

If you're serious about it, then I would just pick up a cheap 120-ish GB SSD for about £30-40 and a USB 3 to SATA adapter. Not much more expensive than SD cards and will ultimately save you considerable time with transfers, compatibility and boot/RW speeds.

I am very serious about it. That is a good idea, because it should be reasonably quick as well.

It might be possible to use an ESata connection, to directly plug the SSD's in.

SSD's have been falling in price a lot over the years. They are probably cheap enough now, to do exactly what you just said.

(The other attraction of SD cards, was that you can get them for say £10 each, with reasonably high capacities).

What I've already done, is use the USB flash pen solution. Allowing me to try out different versions of Linux, without committing my self to changing the main HDD's operating system. You don't even necessarily need more than one flash pen, as you can fairly quickly re-purpose the same one, time and time again.

BUT the flash pen solution (with a USB2 port, rather than a quicker USB3 port), was too slow. Just about fast enough to use, but too slow, really.

Anyway, you have convinced me to use SSD's, in the future. As you say, they are cheap enough now, to use like that now. I can either use USB3 as you suggested, ESata or some kind of rapid Sata plug in system (like you have on many servers, on the front of the rack server. The caddie systems, are available from computer suppliers, for about £50 to £75, for the cheaper ones, with about 4 slots).