Compact flash card IDE adapters

Thinking of buying one of those cheap chinese compact flash to IDE
adapters that appear on ebay quite often for use on a little 486
embedded board that i've got.

can a compact flash be used just like a hard disk - I understand that
there is a limited amount of writes that can be made to a CF card ?

Will any embedded board or PC that accepts an IDE device be
capable of running a CF card without any tweaks?

Is there a significant power saving in using a CF card against say a 2.5"
hard disk ?

Any pitfalls to watch for?

Thanks,

Colin 

Colin MacDougall wrote:
> Thinking of buying one of those cheap chinese compact flash to IDE
> adapters that appear on ebay quite often for use on a little 486
> embedded board that i've got.
>
> can a compact flash be used just like a hard disk - I understand that
> there is a limited amount of writes that can be made to a CF card ?

If you set it up right, it will last a long time.  I am running
KDE/firefox from a CF in read-only mode right now.  During boot-up, it
was mounted read-write for configurations and written less than 10
times.  This way, it should last about 10,000 days.

>
> Will any embedded board or PC that accepts an IDE device be
> capable of running a CF card without any tweaks?

We use them for 486/Pentium 166/Pentium MMX/Celeron 1G/Sempron 2500.
We tested them with AVRs (checking pins/registers), but not really
using them.

>
> Is there a significant power saving in using a CF card against say a 2.5"
> hard disk ?

0.1 W average for CF vs. 5 to 10W for 2.5".

>
> Any pitfalls to watch for?

Don't keep them running in read-write mode.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Colin