Boot from SD card?

[tmp]

Does anybody know will Lenovo provide this BIOS update for x60, x61 series? Or we have to buy x200 to use this feature?

[hanneswy]

i have tried booting from sdcard in my x200s. it works, but it is painfully slow. i run ubuntu linux from the 64gig ssd which boots in about 40s to the desktop (of which the bios and splashscreen take 10s). booting from a class 6 sdcard took about 7 minutes. the cardreader on the x200 is a usb-device, so the access times are worse than every hd.

i installed a recoverysystem on it as a replacement for the lenovo restore partition which i deleted.

dont consider an sdcard as a usable boot medium for everyday usage!

[Astounding]

My x200 boots flawlessly from SD card.

Speed is fine. (Linux live)

[Astounding]

I'm running Arch Linux on my X200 and I boot to a usable XFCE4 desktop w/ compiz desktop in 20.5 seconds from my 7200rpm HDD.

I booted to slax live from the SD card in ~30 seconds to a KDE desktop.

I wouldn't ever recommend running your main OS off an SD card, but much of the content of this thread simply isnt true.

If it's taking 7 minutes something may be seriously wrong.

[tvinson70]

Dude,

Who are you?! I boot to SD all the time to launch Ubuntu, and I love it. Not problem fast and give a great safe browsing experiance.

[Sindala]

Sorry to say, but I don't see any problem in booting up from a SD card. The x121e system is fully capable to boot from USB and we had several decennia when we started up from floppy disk. A SD card is not so different from the USB or Floppy world that this would not be possible.

It is actually quite strange Lenovo doen't offer this booting possibility as they did offer me to make my recovery boot disk and recovery data disk on SD card, just to find that I can't use them for recovery ?

[The_Solutor Guru]

---

teetee wrote:
The fastest sdhc card (class 6) has speed limit of 6mb/sec.  It's not much help for the boot speed if one would want it to be a system disk. 

Comparison:
SSD alternative: 266x~300x CF (~35MB/sec at best)
4200rpm hard drive (~22MB/sec)
Both of them were tested under HDTach through IDE connection.

That's probably why we can get a 16GB SDHC for $60 while a 8GB 266x CF card is still above $100.

---

The key is compression.

When the media is slow but the processor is fast a compressed FS does wonders.

I used for a whole year a linux distro made by me starting from the ubuntu net install, installed on a superslow RS-MMC, using the compressed btrfs filesystem.

The resulting system was really fast, obviously not the fastest in the world, but fast enough, faster than a standard ubuntu installed on a standard HDD.

For the record the RS-MMCs aren't in production since years and the ones available have around 4MB/s of transfer rate, I guess that a recent fas SD in the same configuration will perform really nicely.

[HiVolt]

My X220 can't boot from SD either. I tried after many BIOS updates, thinking they'd fix that.

I mainly would like it to keep bootable rescue utilities on it, not so much an OS.

[topmahof Community Moderator]

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/en/download

How about an external usb card reader?

I've been running linux from an sd and cf card using an external card reader.  It's a little slow, but it works.

Nowadays, usb card readers are pretty small.  

Dave 

[HiVolt]

yeah, usb card reader will work, but i might as well use a usb stick for that.

the nice thing about the SD card is that it sits flush when installed. would be nice to be able to boot from it.