Flash is definitely the way to go - if you have a 512 meg usb flash and a motherboard that supports booting from it, you should be able to get linux running on that. As far as for windows, you would need at least a gig assuming a very small page file. I would avoid using a hard drive as much as possible in this situation.
Also, depending on your cost limit and the performance you need, you might want to consider an embedded system like a gumstix unit.
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Originally Posted by Tristan Lall
Also, I can't help but correct this: SCSI is a bus specification. It is not an indication of shock resistance. Modern SCSI drives are often built with high spindle speeds, but older ones can be had with much slower spindle speeds; I've worked with a 4.3 GB, 4200 rpm SCSI drive, and a brutally slow 200 MB SCSI drive from the mid 1990s. Though I agree that it seems sensible enough that peak spindle speed and vibration resistance may be linked, I'm not sure that the correlation is significant, especially compared to other characteristics of the drives' designs.
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Agreed - and SCSI drives are built to much higher standards as they are usually run 24-7-365 unlike most IDE drives, and need to be reliable in the enterprise environment (and you don't have to tell me about how you run your pc's IDE drives that often, because they will fail - I've had my share of failed ide drives from various mfg's).