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Computer without hdd?

oldman420

oldman420

Platinum Member
Given that hdds are among the biggest bottlenecks in todays PC, and the fact that solid state storage is getting faster and faster would it be possible in the future to have the OS stored right on board?
I mean some sort of high speed programmable ic chip. it seems to me that if you could place the OS on a chip the system would run much faster.
Any thoughts?
 
I saw somewhere, i dont recall tho, that back in the day, they had arrays of regular sdram in the amount of 4-8 gigs that were used for hd purposes. Im pretty sure they had some proprietary chipset that governed them. This was back when 256MB of ram was overkill... I havent kept up with "ram drives" or whatever they are called tho.
 
Originally posted by: oldman420
Given that hdds are among the biggest bottlenecks in todays PC, and the fact that solid state storage is getting faster and faster would it be possible in the future to have the OS stored right on board?
I mean some sort of high speed programmable ic chip. it seems to me that if you could place the OS on a chip the system would run much faster.
Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

I don't think hard drives are as big of a bottleneck as you're implying. Sure, they're orders of magnitude slower than DRAM, which is orders of magnitude slower than SRAM, but that's why computers have memory hierarchies. By having the smaller, faster memory closer to the cpu, and the slower, bigger memory further away, and by intelligently moving data that you are likely to need in the near future (using the principle of locality), the small, fast memory can really do quite a good job of masking the fact that the hdd is so slow. In other words, even though you could in theory have a large solid state memory structure to replace a hdd, you'd lose many orders of magnitude in storage capability (assuming you keep the cost the same...if you keep the storage size the same, you'd see many orders of magnitude increase in cost), and the real increase in speed/performance would be rather small. So, as long as there is such a large discrepency in cost-to-performance ratio of various types of memory/storage devices, memory hierarchy is the way to go for 99.9% of computer users.
 
yeah some companies have made ram drives. a while back i heard domebody asking about getting a stripped down version of xp and 4 gigs of ram and somehow loading everything into ram

real interesting thogh was the technology of using giant flash memory drives to replace hds. somewhere like 80 gigs of flash memory for use in aeronautics and such

oh yeAh they were also like 50 big ones. a bit expensive for most ATers, but there actually was a company making them
 
I have read about a few computers used in "National Security" concerns that had no HD. The thinking was nothing critical would ever be written to disk.I will try and find the rainbow book that it was in.
 
Originally posted by: oldman420
Given that hdds are among the biggest bottlenecks in todays PC, and the fact that solid state storage is getting faster and faster would it be possible in the future to have the OS stored right on board?
I mean some sort of high speed programmable ic chip. it seems to me that if you could place the OS on a chip the system would run much faster.
Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

We already have computers (thin clients) that boot off the network and do all their storage that way. We moved away from storing much of the OS in ROM like the old Amigas and Macs did because it changes so quickly. ROM is also considerably slower than RAM too, so loading from ROM to RAM may be faster than a hard disk, you wouldn't want to run your OS directly from ROM. You could use battery backed up RAM disks as other posts suggest, though those aren't as fast as directly using RAM and may not be much faster than ROM.
 
Quantum made a drive called Rushmore back in the day, dunno if it's still around... exorbitantly expensive, tho.

You could just load tons of RAM onto your system, boot off the network and load a significant RAM drive... just make sure you've got a 5-nines system 😀
 
Originally posted by: oldman420
Given that hdds are among the biggest bottlenecks in todays PC, and the fact that solid state storage is getting faster and faster would it be possible in the future to have the OS stored right on board?
I mean some sort of high speed programmable ic chip. it seems to me that if you could place the OS on a chip the system would run much faster.
Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

Magnetic RAM doesn't lose charge without power, so it might be a solution. People are advocating it as the sucessor to DRAM, so it might happen for all of us.
 
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