Wireless Hacks

Compact Flash Hard Drive

Make your own tiny hard drive with no moving parts and very low power consumption.

One challenge when building your own embedded device is finding enough storage for the operating system and any data you need to keep track of. While 2.5” laptop hard drives probably have the highest ratio of storage space to physical space, they introduce a couple of challenges for an embedded system. A hard drive is a mechanical device, with fairly strict environmental operating conditions (for both temperature and humidity). They generate noise, draw a fair amount of power, and above all, are quite fragile. In other words, you probably wouldn’t want to consider leaving one in a relatively unprotected plastic box on your roof through the winter or summer.

A very popular alternative to traditional hard drives is to use flash RAM instead. Flash memory uses only a tiny fraction of the power that a hard drive uses, and can operate over a much wider range of environmental conditions. It is very tiny, lightweight, and noiseless. It can be rewritten many thousands of times, and can even be dropped on the floor without fear of loss of data. While it isn’t nearly as cost effective in terms of price per bit, the popularity of digital cameras has driven flash memory prices down remarkably. If your application can fit in 32 to 512 MB of space, then flash storage is a viable alternative to 2.5” hard drives.

Many types of flash media can be used as a standard IDE device by using a ...