Motion LS800 table HD failure at 14,000 feet

In rec.aviation.misc Peter wrote:
Flash alternatives (I believe it is a 1.8" HD inside) are extremely
costly, around USD 2000 for 8GB, and I wonder how successful it would
be to put in a 4GB SD card (for which there is a slot), put all maps
on that, etc.

I recently did something like this at work, for somewhat the same
reason. In my case, I had a couple of accelerometers connected to a
data acquisition card in an old desktop PC. The accelerometers got
bolted into a car that was going to be crash-tested, and the PC got
to go along for the ride. We decided that a rotating-platter drive
probably wouldn't cut it, and looked for alternatives.

What we ended up using was an "IDE 4000" series flash drive from
M-Systems. This is flash memory in a package with an IDE connector;
it looks and works just like a regular hard drive to the operating
system. M-Systems sells a couple of different lines of drives - the
ones that support the latest and fastest interfaces (Ultra ATA and
SATA) are indeed expensive - about US$850-$900 for 2 GB. The IDE
4000 series is not quite as fast but is much cheaper; around $200-
$250 for 2 GB in a 3.5" drive. We bought a 2 GB drive from Digi-Key,
http://www.digi-key.com/ - current catalog page
http://dkc3.digikey.com/PDF/T063/0865.pdf .

This system was so old that it was running Windows 98. With the
regular hard drive still in the system, I uninstalled all unneeded
programs and got the total installed size of the system down to well
under 1 GB. I then installed the flash drive and did a drive image
copy from the hard drive to the flash drive (think Norton Ghost or
similar). Then I removed the hard drive and let the system boot up
on the flash drive... no problem. Benchmarking programs showed that
the flash drive was indeed slower than the hard drive, but neither
Windows nor the data-acquisition software seemed to care - I could
still log data to the flash drive as fast as I needed to. The
computer and the flash drive survived the wreck and everyone was
happy.

The problem is that Windoze itself accesses various bits of the HD
anyway, and does anyone know which bits, and can they be moved to
the SD card?

Microsoft knows but they ain't tellin'. I think it's possible to
split things up like this, but it will take a lot of trial and error
to make sure you've got everything you need on the SD card. Even then,
if you accidentally click on the wrong icon or something, Windows may
still try to spin up the hard drive. If you have a real Windows
installation CD (not a "restore" CD provided by the computer
manufacturer), it might be interesting to remove the hard drive from
the PC, install the SD card, boot up the Windows install CD, and see
if you can convince it to install onto the SD card instead. If that
doesn't work, then buying a flash drive that has an IDE interface,
installing it along with your current hard drive, and doing a disk copy
from your current drive to the flash drive (assuming you can fit
everything onto the flash drive) will probably work. If there aren't
enough hard drive connections on your portable PC, you may have to
temporarily install both drives on a desktop PC to do the drive copy,
then put the flash drive back in the portable.

I hope this helps!

Matt Roberds