Garden-variety compact flash cards don't always offer the fixed disk option, so you have to be somewhat selective in the card(s) you buy for this purpose.
XP EMBEDDED CF WINDOWS
If not, then Windows XP will only recognize it as a removable flash drive, and will not allow one to move the pagefile to it. Windows XP recognizes it as an internal hard drive, but there's a catch - it has to be Industrial or True-IDE flash. There are jumpers for Master/Slave, and a separate power feed. One way to accomplish this is to use a Compact Flash IDE adapter, which is a small circuit card that mounts a Compact Flash card on one end, with 40/44 pin IDE connections on the other end. You gain nothing moving the pagefile to a different partition on the same hard drive, and if you want the best I/O speed, you really should move the pagefile drive to a different IDE/SATA channel. I have been working with two variations over the last couple of weeks, both camping out on the Secondary IDE bus, to avoid any data bandwidth conflicts with the system hard drive on the Primary IDE bus. Unfortunately, Windows XP does not allow one to mount a flash card as an internal drive through a USB card reader, at least, not without some serious gyrations, and you're still stuck with that relatively-slow USB data path. The problem there is that the USB interface is pretty slow compared to an IDE or SATA bus, a bottleneck in itself, so it's not the best solution. Windows Vista does something like a mirror of the pagefile in their ReadyBoost technology, using a USB card reader to cache system data. Why? The hard drive heads don't have to access the operating system's pagefile at the same time they're loading a given program file, which keeps the I/O traffic jam minimized. Long story considerably shortened: If you move the Windows XP pagefile to a drive other than the hard drive that the operating system is running on, you gain some measure of performance. It's not a new concept, but the technology has now matured to the point where one can dabble in it and not break the bank in the process. This has been kicked around the Web and discussed inside IT circles since CF and SD cards have dropped in price to affordable numbers.
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