Having successfully installed the OS, my next step was to try and reduce the number of writes that were likely to hit the CF card, this involved moving many of the logging and temporary areas to use tmpfs and also turn off writing time updates every time a file is accessed.
This is all documented on the Installation to Compact Flash web page
After installing all of the recommended updates, I tried running the latency test – well that was a disaster – it flat out refused to run.
This turned out to be because the real time kernel had not loaded, the main suspect for this was the on-board video, so I tried a few PCI video cards, none of which would even generate a signal – looks like the PCI slot is disabled somehow as well!
I eventually gave up on that motherboard and found another one on ebay, that was actually listed on the successful latency test page, for £20.00 including P&P.
This one was an Intel Atom 330 Dual Core D945GCLF2 motherboard with 2 x 1.6Ghz CPUs and 2GB of RAM.
Several people have managed to use this board with the on-board video which is another big plus for me.
It still had an ATA/IDE slot, so I could still use my Compact Flash card, but also has SATA connectors should I decide to use a real hard disk.
I had much better success with this board, everything installed first time and the latency test actually worked straight away.
lnitially I was having latency values of up to 4000uS, however I slowly managed to bring this down, by disabling hyper-threading, audio, legacy USB, anything to do with power saving, and isolating one of the CPU cores in Grub, to achieve a respectable 119uS – still not wonderful, but at least it should be useable.
I have also now bought a 12V 8A power supply brick for £6.28 ($9.75) which means I no longer need to use the full size ATX power supply, I can use my Pico ITX PSU module with this board instead.
The PICO ATX PSU module has a 24 pin power connection, it also has the 4 pin connector for the CPU, what it did not have was the small 4 pin connector to supply 5v to the Compact Flash adapter, but I have a spare adapter cable from some previous PC I can use, so no worries there.
As such I am happy that this is now all ready for when I decide to mount it in the power supply enclosure.