I use a 1 GB Kingston 'Ultra' (100x) CF card in a PC card adaptor as a boot drive for a PB1400. I also have tested a recent 4 GB Intenso SDHC card in a SDHC capable PC card adaptor (manufacturer Delock, about USD 10). Both allow for booting into OS 9.2.2 within less than a minute. The data access rate seems not to improve with even faster CF cards, there might be another limiting factor. I use the drives with either virtual memory turned off or allocate another disk for swapping memory (an additional CF card in a CF-IDE adaptor in place of the internal harddisk works fine for this purpose).
It is absolutly great to have a machine that does not make any unintended audible noise.
Hint for formatting the CF-Card: use the most recent disk utility software (I use the disk utility from a recent PowerBook running OS X). Make sure to use HFS+ format and install OS 9 drivers. In case you will install OS 7.6 use standard HFS. To avoid the PC card adaptor being kicked out of the slot each shutdown, do a Sys. 8.1 installation from CD _without_ having the disk driver 'updated'. Other versions of Mac OS installers might work as well, but Mac OS 9 does not. Afterwards just copy a preinstalled System Folder of your choice onto the CF card and 'bless' it.
As far as it belongs to the Addonics IDE CF adaptor and similar devices: Be aware of the fact, that the PowerBook 1400 will use only devices identified as 'fixed media' as a boot drive in place of the internal harddisk. Access to a 'removable media' attached to the internal IDE host works only after booting into an appropriate system on another drive (PC card/CD ROM/external SCSI). A restart might be successful after overwriting the driver from internal ROM into volatile RAM, but no cold starting process.
For internal use prefer to purchase a CF card that identifies as a 'fixed media' when used in IDE mode. Recent industrial grade CF cards do so, usually. Some consumer grade CF cards (a lot cheaper) do, but most of them will not work easily. Several UDMA cards are reported to work like this.
It is absolutly great to have a machine that does not make any unintended audible noise.
Hint for formatting the CF-Card: use the most recent disk utility software (I use the disk utility from a recent PowerBook running OS X). Make sure to use HFS+ format and install OS 9 drivers. In case you will install OS 7.6 use standard HFS. To avoid the PC card adaptor being kicked out of the slot each shutdown, do a Sys. 8.1 installation from CD _without_ having the disk driver 'updated'. Other versions of Mac OS installers might work as well, but Mac OS 9 does not. Afterwards just copy a preinstalled System Folder of your choice onto the CF card and 'bless' it.
As far as it belongs to the Addonics IDE CF adaptor and similar devices: Be aware of the fact, that the PowerBook 1400 will use only devices identified as 'fixed media' as a boot drive in place of the internal harddisk. Access to a 'removable media' attached to the internal IDE host works only after booting into an appropriate system on another drive (PC card/CD ROM/external SCSI). A restart might be successful after overwriting the driver from internal ROM into volatile RAM, but no cold starting process.
For internal use prefer to purchase a CF card that identifies as a 'fixed media' when used in IDE mode. Recent industrial grade CF cards do so, usually. Some consumer grade CF cards (a lot cheaper) do, but most of them will not work easily. Several UDMA cards are reported to work like this.