General Discussion

Yesterday evenning a strange thing happened. I had bought some 1GB CF card to give pfSense a test run. So far so good, when i was finished reviewing pfSense i put back my m0n0 cf into my box.

It was about midnight and wanted to look at my emails before going to bed and suddenly the Internet begun to slow down. I went to the m0n0 config and wanted to change some stuff and the php pages started complaining about the not found xml file.....
I rebooted the box but it would not boot anymore.... Plugged everything off and went to bed. As i woke up this morining i tried to boot the m0n0wall and again it would not boot up. I hooked up a keyboard and a monitor and the system bios did not recognize the CF anymore..... Unplugged the CF/IDE adapter and i had to notice that something was moving inisde the CF.... I always thought CF card do not have moving parts...

What happened ? I do not know... Maybe the CF overheated ? My box i a thin client fitted with a second PCI NIC and i positionned it vertically. This way, the CPU and the chipset are just under the CF and i guess that the CF gets all the heat of them......  Now i placed the box horizontally so that the heat can directly evacuate through the case's holes....
Anyone ever had the same issue ?

Is this a CF or a microdrive?  CF has no moving parts and typically nothing that can move inside of them. They can't really overheat either, they have a max operating temperature of 85 C (185 F), but that's not something you're going to see inside a PC case unless you have some very serious problems, like the machine is on fire.    If it's sitting on top of a CPU that doesn't have a heat sink and is supposed to, that may be feasible, but otherwise I really doubt if it could get anywhere near that hot.

This was a pure flash based CF....

I recently mounted an Intel dual nic.... This card worked very well, but since it's PCB is quite big, it is blcoking the holes in the case and heat does not get out of it.... The CF was again very hot...... i moved back to crappy Realtek (it has a very small PCB) and heating problems were vanished....

I had a same problem with heat
i think Intel Dual NIC 100/PRO runs hot maybe for server cases are designed
and there i lot of air but my SFF has the same problem with heat