Flash memory as a drive?

[Odoacer]

I was wondering if I could set up an array of Smartmedia's or something and then somehow have the computer recgonize it as one logical drive.

The reason why I ask is because I'm tired of waiting for Windows to load so putting the OS on flash memory should make things pretty fast. Or at least I hope so. If not, it still would be an interesting experiment to try.

Do you guys think it's possible? I might go as far as to get a custom PCB built to try it out. Or is it more feasible to take a bunch of external readers and connect them together in a fashion similar to RAID.

Thanks for your feedback, i really want to try this

 

[JC]

Interesting...but the BIOS doesn't recognize those kinds of storage at initial boot, do they? Seems like they have to wait for Windoze to assign them a drive letter, AIUI.
But aren't there solid-state (flash) hard drives available out there? As in an actual replacement for a HD. I'll have a look around.

JC

edit: try this link.

 

[Odoacer]

Sounds good. At least now I know it's feasible. But woah, those look like industrial-grade hard drives... comes with a hefty price tag, I presume.

And yeah, the BIOS probably won't recgonize it at first boot... probably as a unknown IDE device or something. But that's what drivers are for, I suppose. But I don't know how to program drivers.. hmm... i think this might be outta my scope at this moment, but I still want to hear from you guys.

Speak up!

 

[yg17]

sounds like a waste of money if its only going to save a minute or so

 

[gnef]

SSD are pretty expensive. I looked into it a while ago... most of them don't have prices listed for a reason, they are tailored to the business market where they call in an order for an array of close to a terabyte of ssd... the price is pretty hefty, but not as much as it used to be. They told me around a buck per meg. I originally wanted about a GB for teh OS, so that came out to about 1000$ just for teh HD... no way... cenatek has something called ramdrive where you can utilize your ram as a harddrive if you want to just play around with something like that... they also have the rocketdrive, which is similar to an ssd, but just uses regular ram which loses it's memory after powerdown. bitmicro is the company i looked into, interesting specs, but still very expensive for any lay consumer...

-Mel

 

[gnef]

It will not just save a minute. The seek times are in micro seconds, and possibly in the near futer in nanoseconds very feesibly. hard drives are rated at milliseconds. there is a vast difference, plus since there is no spinning of the hard drive or of the arm moving, the transfer speed is constant and in most cases higher, bitmicro has their ide ssd as 68 MB/s w/ 100 MB/s peak. That is fast - especially since the hard drive is almost always the bottleneck in the system - why performance gurus almost always go scsi, and soon to be ssd if they have the money...

-Mel

 

[yg17]

My windows XP loads in about a minute and a half running on a PII 400MHz and 5400 RPM, ATA66 drive. Im sure on an Athlon with a 7200 RPM, ATA100 drive, Windows XP load time is under a minute. SSD might be near instant, but is it really worth all the money to have windows load instantly instead of a minute or less? No

 

[Eug]

<< It will not just save a minute. The seek times are in micro seconds, and possibly in the near futer in nanoseconds very feesibly. hard drives are rated at milliseconds. there is a vast difference, plus since there is no spinning of the hard drive or of the arm moving, the transfer speed is constant and in most cases higher, bitmicro has their ide ssd as 68 MB/s w/ 100 MB/s peak. That is fast - especially since the hard drive is almost always the bottleneck in the system - why performance gurus almost always go scsi, and soon to be ssd if they have the money...

-Mel >>


Perhaps, but the original post asked about Smartmedia. My guess is the world's fastest Smartmedia doesn't even hit a 5 MB/s sustained read speed. Furthermore, I've read that Smartmedia is a "dumb" technology in that it cannot be natively recognized without a proper controller. Indeed, I cannot use SmartMedia in a PCMCIA reader without a very expensive converter card. The converter card for CompactFlash costs $10 and I'm told is about as simple as can be, since CompactFlash has the controller built in to the card. And, you can buy 1 GB cards today. Speed is similarly slow though - the fastest posted speed I've ever seen (with a Firewire reader) is a little over 4 MB/s, but that was a little while ago. Interestingly, you can also buy CompactFlash-sized REAL hard drives (up to 1 GB), but as you might guess they're even slower than the fastest CompactFlash.

So cheap flash memory cards are not going to solve your problem. A much easier and cheaper solution would be to get a couple of lightening fast IDE drives, connect them in RAID 0 (THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT OF RAID 0 ) and do a laptop install of Windows XP.

Not that I really know anything about electronics, but it seems to me if you even want to try this just out of interest's sake, CompactFlash may be the way to go. It is interesting to note that some guy has built a CompactFlash reader for an old Apple II or something like that. It was linked to Woz's website a while back.

 

[alen1234]

Save your money. If you really want the speed, go invest in SCSI.

 

[Elledan]

Of course, with Flash memory getting damaged every time it is being written to, it won't last longer than a week. Expensive experiment.

I would bet on something like MRAM instead.

BTW, many solid state drives use normal (SDR/DDR) RAM plus a battery to keep the data intact while the system is powered down.