CF cards as boot drives

[OhYou_]

My company has two industrial machines that run windows on these little touch panel pcs and they use CF cards as boot drives.
I want to buy some more drives and create clones of the original drives because we recently had one corrupt the os and the pc wouldn't boot until I had to travel there and fix it.

if i have physical cold spares just laying around, I can instead just instruct someone to swap te card and its fixed.

Is there anything special I should look for with CF cards used as a windows computer hard drive?
I found these which claim to be using SLC nand which in theory is better than MLC or TLC but also idk if SLC is even made anymore and they could just be old stock
https://buy.advantech.com/Peripherals-Modules/Industrial-Storage-Solutions-Compact-Flash-SLC-Temp-40-85-C/model-SQF-P10S1-1G-P8E.htm

[manikyath]

i presume these dont write a lot (if at all) to their boot drives?

 

if that's the case, just get whatever you can find, and get loads of them. 

[Needfuldoer]

Is it plain-old, run of the mill Windows, or Windows Embedded? I think Windows Embedded doesn't write as much to the drive, so it doesn't use the card up as fast.

 

Definitely stick with 'industrial' cards that are rated for use as a boot drive, especially if downtime costs money. You don't want to cheap out and buy random CF cards that may not even support fixed disk mode. (Been there, done that. Disk images and cold spares saved our bacon more than a few times...) Old stock may not necessarily be a bad thing in this case. 

 

I used to support an "embedded" system that was just a glorified PC running NT 4.0 SP3 (UND ONLY SP3) off of CF cards. I could never convince the powers that be to run off of an industrial SATA DOM running through an IDE bridge. At least a PCI slot CF card reader made swaps faster when the cards inevitably died. 

[OhYou_]

11 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

or Windows Embedded

windows xp embedded, I loaded one of the images up to check and ignoring the chkdsk I ran when it shit itself a few days ago and again in 2018, the last file that was written was in 2015 when someone plugged in a mouse.

 

i guess write endurance is more of a gauge of quality vs a necessity

[kokosnh]

this looks more like a data retention problem, then a write endurance problem... just saying. for those CF cards
So yes SLC one will last years, and probably different electronic components will die, before data retention problem

[Needfuldoer]

8 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

windows xp embedded

I remember running XP Embedded. As long as you treat it as "set it and forget it", even inexpensive consumer cards should last a long time. 

[OhYou_]

based, any specific card recommendations? or im gonna just get the advantech ones

[Kilrah]

Should be fine. It advertises wear leveling, and that's the one thing that you want in long-term applications that's not present in most consumer ones.