>>yes, but the REAL question is why is this USB boot taking so long? USB 
>>being 10Mb per second should be able to deliver m0n0 in less than 10 
>>seconds.
>>    
>>
>no. 10Mb/s is USBs' data xfer rate. solid state memory has its own limits
>and the card you are using probably has much lower access/read/write times
>- most likely to be about 250k/s
>  
>
Why would a CF-IDE adapter be faster then CF-USB?  Or did I miss the 
point of this thread?

 [Mitch says:] 
The interface is the interface and the memory is the memory...

With ATA / IDE, there is (currently) a 33MHz bus (old), a 66MHz, and a
100MHz - right? The bus speed doesn't change how fast your old 5400 RPM
drive reads data off the platters...

The same thing applies here - sort of.

CD-IDE WILL run at ATA speeds, which is MUCH faster than USB... but the
bottleneck CAN be the memory speed, which will limit the over all transfer
rate... some cheaper cards are slower by 20x or more than the faster
cards... There could also be overhead in the bios start-up and recognition
of the USB boot drive itself or other factors...

Hope that helps.

m/