Turning a Thin Client into a real Dos box

[kbit]

 I found an old thin client that is very small { 4.5 in x 4.5 x 1.5 } at a 2nd hand store for $3 and it worked .  I installed dos 6.22 on it as it just had a boot version with a batch file on it . My question is should I switch to a hard drive instead of a dom { disk on module } . I read that the kind of flash for this machine is only good for 10000 writes before it degrades significantly , which seems rather small and would not last long when used in this fashion{ as a pc } By sheer luck I have a good hdd that will fit into it but I have no ribbon cable { 1 inch 44 pin ide } but it is 80gb and dos will only see the first 512mb { which is good as it will give max speed } How long would dos/win3.11 take to make 10000 writes?

[DaveLembke]

How long would dos/win3.11 take to make 10000 writes?

DOS is usually Read-Only, so as long as nothing changes no data is added or removed it would last quite a while. If you had something in your autoexec.bat or config.sys that required data to be written to drive, then you would have to worry about this I suppose if its frequently rebooted or you have some sort of program you will be running that instead of running primarily in RAM, it uses HDD as a swap or Cache etc.

Windows is when Microsoft started writing to disk from the OS on every boot as well as during operation.

If you go with Freedos instead of actual MSDOS, you could even possibly make this Thin Client boot off of a thumb drive and run everything from that. Even though thumb drives are generally slow for communications in comparison to HDD's and especially SSD's, the data quantity in a DOS like environment is very small and so everything should still run as quick as the thin client can process it. Such as a thumb drive can access and load a 48k file very quickly because the size of the file is lesser than the data bandwidth of say a 4GB thumb drive and so it would be almost instantaneous in a DOS or FreeDOS environment.

[kbit]

 Yeah , I want to use this just like a real pc { within its limitations } and my plan is to buy more thin clients off ebay and use all my old OSes { dos6.22/win3.11 , win98, win98se, ubuntu, etc } and network them . I don't like VM , so I will go with the real McCoy .  While flash is fast I think I will look for hdd capable thin clients for endurance . Maybe I'll try freedos like you suggest but I will be playing games and playing with batch files and changing the config.sys , etc. , etc. so there will be a lot of writes when I use it/them . Thanks for your answer .