[Gllug] Compact Flash, more or less power than IDE?

[Ian Norton]

Hi folks,

I have a (mostly) dead toshiba laptop, it 'could' be used as a desktop machine,
enough of it works for that, 

however, I have had a little pet project ive been thinking of using it for, it
is intended to be the brain of a little rover type robot thing that will wonder
about and take pics of stuff, and communicate via wifi, using its serial port
to provide the ability to re-program an fpga for some active sonar stuff and
use the parallel port for about 8 simple output+input control lines (wheels, 
angle sensor etc) 

i have one of those cheapo sandisk CF->PCMCIA cards, and in linux it shows as a
ide device, I was thinking, if i run syslinux or loadlin off of a floppy to
boot and then mount the cf card with the root fs on, would i be using much less
power than running from the cdrom?

this is partly because i do not have a spare ide disk, and the bios is slightly 
stupid and wont boot from the slave ide cdrom (cdrom is on the secondary ide, 
bios will only allow you to boot from pri or sec masters).

the cf cards get quite hot, so i have no idea of the energy usage on one.

Ian

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