WinXP O/S on a 4GB Flash Memory Card....

[SeeMoreDigital]

WinXP O/S on a 4GB Flash Memory Card....

Given that the prices of large capacity flash memory cards has fallen quite considerably and their speeds increased. Would there be any benefits to going down such a route?

Does anybody have any idea's or thoughts?


Cheers

[Surf]

A couple that I can think of:

Boot up speed

Subsequent seek & write...

USB or Firewire is nowhere near the fiendish SATA throughput.

[SeeMoreDigital]

USB or Firewire is nowhere near the fiendish SATA throughput.How about a laptops PCMCIA card slot?

[foxyshadis]

I've seen USB key installs (http://www.google.com/search?q=usb+key+windows+xp) of windows for a couple of years now. It's faster than some hard drives (esp. fragmented ones) and instantly portable with all your settings, but drivers are a hassle as usual. Great for emergency backup OS though.

You can even get windows on a 256M stick if you cut it down enough in nlite (but you need to use the main drive for swap and temp, really), but you lose a lot of driver flexibility then.

[mod]

DSL (Damn Small Linux) fits on a 64mb usb card.. give it a try.. ;)

[SeeMoreDigital]

Personally speaking... I don't fancy learning the ins-and-outs of another O/S :(

[Doom9]

You gotta have a RAM disk to really speed things up. Your 08/15 memory stick has really sucky performance.. you gotta get one of the really expensive ones to have halfway acceptable performance, and throughput wise it still cannot compete with a halfway decent harddisk. If you can make the stick read only it may serve as a fancy antivirus disk, but I don't really see the practical aspect except for such an approach.

I've also booted windows from a CD.. once again it can be practical for error recovery, but other than that it's of no real use because it's just too darned slow.

[CWR03]

I've worked on equipment that uses flash media in place of a hard drive, running Windows NT embedded, and it's really slow to boot. I have an old Pentium II 266 running XP that boots faster. The only reason they've avoided hard drives in their equipment was to eliminate any mechanical parts in the harsh environment in which they're located.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Hmmm!

How about using the proposed "flash memory" O/S approach for running say, a 24hr file server, with say 4No HDD's

Does the O/S need to work so fast with such a set-up?


Cheers

[AVIL]

Hi,

I'd tried to put virtual memory files in a flash memory and windows XP ignore them. The rest of files are far less used (the kernel is cached in memory). Then I think that appart virtual memory and hibernate files the rest may reside in harddisk with no noticeable disadvantage over flash memory. But an operating system's backup is a good idea.

[SeeMoreDigital]

This 4GB Compact Flash card seems pretty quick -

http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=777_6&products_id=101183

[foxyshadis]

For comparison, hard drives have a transfer rate of 40-80MB/s, and the fastest flash cards out there are 20MB/s. (Sandisk ExIII is definitely among the fastest.)

[Gehenna]

Interesting..4gb CF cards are cheaper than i imagined.

I currently use a CF>IDE converter on my NAS server (freenas),the demands of a stripped down freebsd work well in this type of enviroment...
If you are using the machine purely as a file server,why not look at freenas or NASlite?
Freenas (http://freenas.org)
NASlite (http://www.serverelements.com/)
Their are no real demands of learning a new O/S,just install on machine,then use a web GUI to config the machine..


Personally,i have been trying to justify to myself getting an I-RAM for some time now. (Use on HTPC)
Best price i could find is around £350-£375 (i-RAM + 4gb pc3200),very hard to justify for something only as fast as SATA,with the added pitfall of loosing the lot

[Audionut]

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram/index.x?pg=1

Gigabyte i-RAM


The review I seen in APC mag, had much faster system boot time and much faster hd-tach speeds.

[tomos]

booting XP off the i-ram was a few seconds faster than XP off a raptor. not a major diff. access times were obviously faster but the i-ram is limited by your SATA bus so bandwidth isnt that good. personally, i would buy 2 raptors instead

this (http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=7061172&postcount=49) is what someone on another forum said about it