Operating System on a SDHC card

Saw a deal today on a SDHC Class 6 card and it got my wheels turning with regard to operating system flexibility on my EEE PC 1000HE (I love the built in SDHC reader).

Ideally, I’d like to find a good 16GB SDHC card and migrate my Windows XP environment over to said and keep the HD a dual boot between Windows 7 (pending) and Ubuntu.

The Class 6 speeds seem like they’d support the occasional boot and run of Windows XP, or at the very least, keep a peppy VMWare or VirtualBox image on hand without chewing HD space.

Looking at the A-Data 16GB SDHC Class 6 card reviews on NewEgg I found conflicting information.  Some good caveats there regarding the write longevity of these devices and–in essence–a warning that SDHC cards aren’t designed to run an OS off of them.  I recall this from the early days of flash memory and I’d be wary of running full bore off of any flash memory, but damn it’d be convenient for those “sometimes” OS’s.  And the A-Data 16GB  is affordable and compatible with the EEE PCs.

NewEgg Reviews of note:

Scott (aka SLINC)

…looking through the reviews of this, I notice a lot of people using this for applications that it’s not intended (Running an OS on his Asus EEE PC), then giving a bad review becasue the card died during that.

People these cards are not made / designed to run and OS like that or be something that is taking constant transfers. They are a convenience memory made for “Short Bursts”. They are not a Hard Drive, they are to be used in Digital Devices and as Extra Storage, not as your Main Hard Disk.

And Felix adds…

Other Thoughts: If you plan on using this in the EeePC et al, make sure to disable memory caching. These types of storage cards (SD and SDHC) can only handle writing or deleting _whole_ files (such as what cameras do). If you let your PC continually write and rewrite data (as in RAM, or caching), the card will become corrupt and unusable. It doesn’t matter which brand you buy–they’re not meant for OS memory caching!

Further complicating my considerations, I found a few EEE PC forums with people seeming gung ho about installing onto SDHC.

• Installing Operating System on SD card
• XEPC EEEPC Operating System 1.7 on USB/SDHC
• Running OS from SD?

For now, I’ll sit on this blog post and play around with my existing Kingston 8GB SDHC Class 6 to see how it performs.  Should the prices for 16GB come down, I may pull the trigger and see what happens when I try to run XP off it