Solid State drive??

[JeffreyLebowski]

With the current cost of memory, Would it not be feasible for a company to make say a 1GB solid state drive with the memory used in like USB drives, that you could run your OS and swap file from?

Or is there a way to do this with just a regular USB 2.0 drive?

 

[Regs]

There are programs out now that can actually partition your systems ram into hard drive space(including its own drive letter or ID) if you really wanted to. RAMDISK I think, does this.

 

[Vegito]

not the one you can boot off from, there are a lot of company making IDE interface RAM drive that you can boot from.. range from 512mb to 16 gb (costly)

 

[piasabird]

They make IDE interfaces with Flash Card slots in them.



www.idotpc.com IDE Flash Card Adapter.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: piasabird
They make IDE interfaces with Flash Card slots in them.

www.idotpc.com IDE Flash Card Adapter.

This comes up often.

Short answer: Flash RAM cells are only good for a few hundred thousand rewrites. Running an operating system off of a flash RAM card will destroy it in a matter of days, if not sooner.

To make a true solid-state hard drive that will last, you need to use very expensive SRAM, or else use DRAM that is mirrored to a conventional hard disk and loaded into memory at boot and written down to disk at poweroff.

 

[T9D]

http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm

 

[fkloster]

2 GB solid state rocket drive for $1600 shipped

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: tk109
http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm

To be fair, this product is not a true 'solid state hard drive'. If your power cuts out, any data on the RocketDrive is gone. It's more like a hardware RAMDrive; your computer sees it like a hard disk, but it's really just data sitting in volatile DRAM -- but the DRAM is attached to a PCI card instead of being taken from your system RAM. This makes it unsuitable for applications where data integrity has to be preserved even if there is a hardware failure. It's perfect as a high-speed scratch disk or swapfile, or for read-only applications (like web serving or some databases).

Of course, it doesn't cost nearly as much as a true SSD!

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: tk109
http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm

I am very familiar with that, it is made from highly volitile SDRAM (PC133) and is not recommended for storage.

Yes, you can use a pen drive as a hard drive or swap file. But only if you have DISK ON KEY PRO because is contains an on board ARM-7 mobile processor that tricks the bios in to thinking that it is a hard drive. It shows up on mine and several friends BIOS. But to use one as a swap file or full time BOOT PARTITION is a terable mistake for several reasons:
1] you will burn out your flash drive in less than a year or so of constant use.
2] Read and write performance of flash devices range from 2MB/s to 10MB/s; very slow indeed. You are better off with dedicated 7200 or 5400 RPM HDD as a Swap Drive where its only purpose is to host Virtual RAM using a flash drive for much is slower for Page Files.
3] Bootable USB Pen Drives Like the Disk on Key PRO (ARM-7) that I own are a much better replacement for a tempory boot device like the floppy had been used for in the past few years. http://www.diskonkey.com/

M-Systems inc Make both SCSI (oooh SCSI...Drool!) and IDE based multi-gigabyte Solid State Hard Drives. Their applications are primarily for use in rough conditions like avaition, automotive and on ships since rotating disks can not take the stress of motion and g-forces. Expect to get 20-40MB/s From the SCSI version and less from IDE Based SSD Drives. My Hitachi 7k250 8MB does 89-90 MB/s on its innermost Track and on the outer Tracks can get 50-60MB/s.
http://www.m-systems.com/conte...cts/product.asp?pid=15. For 20Gigs of SCSI Flash is going to cost around 30k, last time I checked.


Here is an affordable High Speed option that i have looked into before, something called hyperdrive (Click here for the Forum). These things hold great promise and are non-volitile and are scalable: connect several of these togheter for multivolume Raid0 and
watch performance multiply with the addition of extra hyperdrives.
http://www.hyperosforum.co.uk/hosf/viewtopic.php?t=672

 

[Googer]

does anyone know a thing about puRAM?

 

[Matthias99]

Here is an affordable High Speed option that i have looked into before, something called hyperdrive (Click here for the Forum). These things hold great promise and are non-volitile and are scalable: connect several of these togheter for multivolume Raid0 and
watch performance multiply with the addition of extra hyperdrives.

This is essentially the same thing as the Cenatek RocketDrive, except it has an IDE interface (rather than PCI), and it has an onboard battery to keep it from getting wiped out during brief power outages. It *should* be stable for about 2 hours without power, according to their specs.

does anyone know a thing about puRAM?

That was a particular brand of SSD being "sold" by Go-L, a possibly nonexistent ultra-high-end PC company. It is believed that they were simply M-Systems' SSDs.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: piasabird
They make IDE interfaces with Flash Card slots in them.



www.idotpc.com IDE Flash Card Adapter.

OOOPS! wrong post.