Hi guys! I'm thinking of building a system without a hard drive, and I was wondering what the longevity of a CompactFlash card would be. I read they have a minimum of 100,000 erase cycles, but I don't know how that compares in a practical desktop environment to an HDD. Would I need to just store a system image on the CompactFlash and load to a ramdisk for normal operation?

What is DDR RAM's longevity in erase cycles, or is it not measured this way? The other option would be to put a tiny hard drive in the box.

What I'm looking for is:
1. Small form factor
2. Quiet operation
3. Longevity

Not necessarily in that order. I'm not looking to have much storage space, though it would have to hold a fully functional desktop Linux OS, albeit a lightweight one. I'm thinking 1GB.

EDIT: And it would have to hold the system and (probably) user config files.

you could use a live cd, that way you would have the entire flash card's space available for storing stuff... of course, like you said, flash will only give you a certain amount of writes before it goes bad (so forget about using write mode on the flash if you want longevity)...

the best thing is to find a way to do this without having any write access to the flash card... like, maybe the system on flash (read-only) and maybe a zip drive for storing stuff...