Has anybody here tried setting up a CF Card as their startup disk for OS X?

If so I would love some tips and suggestions for settup and hardware. I have ordered on of the CF to2.5" IDE adapters and will order a 8gb CF card shortly.

Brand Suggestions?

Is there another reason to do this besides the coolness factor or its size?  Most CF cards will not run as fast as a hard drive.  Two of them in a raid may work better though.  I would love to see a mod guide on this if you pull it off.

Yes there is a reason, actually multiple.

If you get a resonable speed CF card it should be pretty fast, but more to the point I see 3 advantages:

1.) I am trying to make a tablet design, hence space is at a premium CF Cards = Small

2.) CF Cards are very vibration resistant. (I was considering putting this project on a vespa)

3.) Retrieving data from a CF card requires far less energy than spooling up a HD

But there a re downsides, they are pricy as far a storage i.e. 8gb = $130+ and speed can be an issue and again faster cards are pricy.

Just a couple thoughts.

I tried to use a a PCMCIA flash drive as a scratch disk in order to boost performance on my Lombard before it got nicked. Didn't work since on the Lombard at least, the scratch disk initialises before the PCMCIA drivers. So no joy there.
I wanted to boot from it, but despite my best efforts, I failed to strip Tiger (or it may have been Panther) down to under the 1GB size of the card. I suspect it wouldn't have worked anyway, for the same reason as the scratch disk.
CF to IDE or SATA should work fine. SATA will probably give a better speed boost over the HD. RAIDing two of them is only going to help if you have two independent busses for them. You can do this with a PowerBook, but you will lose your optical drive. RAIDing two with an iBook will also lose your optical drive, but won't be any faster than a single card anyway, since both drives are on one bus.
MacBooks and MacBook Pros have only one SATA connector, and RAIDing across SATA and ATA is silly.

All legitimate reasons.  I hope it works!  I have seen people use them for scratch disks on desktops using fw or sub.  Good luck.

Well This lends some street cred to my idea, but how to do it....
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2092

I just got my 4GB card in the mail last night and I did a disk utility on it, so it is formated to OS X, but I keep getting an I/O error when I try to do a restore from a nice small OS X partition I made on one of my FW drives.

Any suggestions?

¡Great Suffering Friends! 

It looks like in all my illustrious wisdon I hsed my new 4gb CF card.

So others might benifit from my mistake and not propagate it I have to sugestions:

1.) Make sure the adapter you muy is a MALE one as opposed to Female
2.) You cannot plug the Female on directly into the boad even though it fits, tis possibly caused its failure, it could also be trying to write the OS to the card and formatting it may times.

So a new adapter is on the way and I need to find cheaper smaller cards.

Any suggestions for creating a .dmg of OS X besides disk utility, it was being very grumpy when I had tried that.

A little news:

I ordered a new male 40pin 2.5" adapter and after frying the old CF card tried the card that came with my Canon XT. Success! it recognizes it as an HD even with the HD icon (strange I thought). I had to bend a pin to make it fit but pretty neat. I have another card coming from newegg.com that is a 2gb, so it should fit a stripped down OS X, we will see I guess. Here are some pics:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/keynesiandream/273948472/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/112/273948472_c7f4753d84_o.jpg" width="499" height="333" alt="Substitute HD" /></a>

and the results:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/keynesiandream/273948475/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/95/273948475_1dbf4faa0a_o.jpg" width="499" height="333" alt="It's Alive!" /></a>

Let me know what you think, or if you have any suggestions for the next step.

2GB is just enough. A stripped Tiger is 1.9GB, leaving you a little room for a swapfile. Really a 4GB would be better.

A 4 gig card might work better cause the 2 gig flash card is not going to be a full 2 gigs. Just like all hard drives it suffers from the same genius which plauges all writable media. It won't be a full 2 gigs. You might not even be able to fit osx on there at least maybe not Tiger. Even if you were able to it might choke with a swapfile. I say this cause my 2 gig Nano is only 1.7 gigs. I had a good install of Tiger running on my G4 Cube with only a 4 gig hdd, that would give a decent bit for the swapfile too.

my two cents

macdeviant