Related link: http://features.engadget.com/entry/8817137592535661/
Phillip sez: “This week?s How to from Engadget is a handy one for the Mac folks out there who want to run multiple operating systems, but not install them to their hard drive, all using an iPod as a bootable FireWire drive. They also cover ways to simply back up your home directory (or anything else to your iPod) which can be handy too, and even used in conjunction with this how-to. Still no word on where Apple’s “Home on iPod” is.”
Microsoft Word hates you
"This week?s" ?
Mark, you aren't copying and pasting directly from Word are you? :-)
Better buy AppleCare..
Although Apple acknowledges this feature, it is unsupported:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60920#faq24
The iPod drive spends about 19 minutes 55 seconds of every 20 minutes IDLE. It loads the next 20 minutes of music into static RAM and then sleeps. Ever felt a tiny vibration when holding an iPod or heard a little "whirring" sound in a quiet environment? That is the drive firing up for a second or two. This allows great battery efficiency compared to constantly accessing a drive.
The iPod drive is sandwiched between other electronic components in an environment without airflow and good heat dissipation. An iPod drive which runs and runs will get hot. With nowhere for the heat to go, this has simply got to greatly reduce the life of the component.
If you could boot up and then use a swap file on another volume (designed to run all the time), perhaps that would be workable.