is it possible to run a computer off flash memory yet?

Factual Questions
1

Now with flash drives approaching 2G or more, would it be quicker (i) on startup or (ii) normal running to put the OS and important files and programmes such as IE onto a flash drive instead of a hard drive. Are flash drives as fast as RAM?

2

Flash drives/cards are currently available in capacities up to 16 gigs. Re speed, no they are not as system RAM. In fact in many cases they are (surprisingly) slower than hard drives.

3

You could run it off a flash drive. In fact, VIA makes mini-ITX motherboards with a Compact Flash reader built in. You can plug in a 4 gig CF card and throw a stripped down version of Windows on it, and be ready to go.

I think the biggest problem is that flash based memory has a limited amount of read/write cycles, so they get worn out quicker than hard drives. The speed at which they operate is faster, of course. I’m not sure if its as fast as RAM, but I’d guess its close.

4

well, this sounds like something that someone with some tecchie skill and a flash card that they don’t NEED should try out. :wink: Hehehe, half kidding, but I’d be curious as to whether such a config actually benchmarks faster than running windows off a hard drive, and how fast the card would wear out.

5

I read this on Slashdot during the week:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/10/HNusbserver_1.html

6

Direct flash drive replacements for HD’s exist. A company called Wolverine, for one, makes them:

http://www.dpie.com/storage/at3550.html

And systems are made using things like these. What’s probably going to stop you from doing so is the price. You can pick up one of those Wolverine 60 gig drives for about $35K.

(the people who pay that kind of price are people who want a computer to work in an extreme environment where a regular hard drive wouldn’t survive the pounding - military applications, for instance)

7

You can put Damn Small Linux onto a standard USB drive, and boot right off of that, assuming your motherboard supports booting off of USB devices. They even sell 256MB drives with DSL preloaded, for $60.

8

It depends on your definition of “computer”.

When you ask a question about computers, try to be more specific.

9
  • Most people that use these do so to run smaller Linux distros on “silent” machines. A flash drive is faster than a hard drive but still much slower than RAM. Flash media does have a much-more-limited amount of read/write cycles available than a regular hard drive so they use system configurations that minimize writing to the media. Often they tweak it so that it reads when it starts up, and only writes a bit when the machine is shut down.
    ~
10

I was going to try this very experiment next weekend. I just obtained a IDE flash reader and was just going make a bootable partition put the Linux /boot directory on it. Will let you know how it goes.

11

HP makes a free utility that formats their flash drives as bootable DOS disks. It works fine with other makes as well. I made mine bootable and it’s a nifty recovery utility, sort of the ultimate boot disk. Put a couple of simple utilities like NTFSDOS and XCOPY on it and you’ve got a great way to salvage data.

12

People keep assuming that flash RAM is comparatively fast relative to hard drive read write access speeds … well cause it’s RAM!

It’s not - The structure of fash memory has inherent limitations on read-write speeds. All things being equal the real world read-write performance of a current 120 gig hard disk with a 2-8 meg cache is going to be considerably faster than a flash drive(s).

Flash memory

13
  • I dunno if this is actually available yet but it definitely works, it doesn’t cost an impossible amount to obtain and it’s really really fast. It runs right into the speed limit of the PCI bus.

…The practical problem with it however is not its own but really a problem with operating systems: it never gets used ideally because Windows does not have any special method included for utilizing RAMdrives efficiently. Neither does Apple or Linux–though there may be one for Linux by now. The RAMdrive benchmarks nearly 6X the speed of a Raptor high-speed 10,000 RPM hard-drive, but in actual use the RAMdrive never operates anywhere near that data rate. It rarely gets used at over 2X the speed of a regular hard-drive.
~

14

Nitpick - that I-RAM device you linked to does not run into the speed limit of the PCI bus (133 MB/s, shared by all PCI device) since it only uses the PCI slot for power. It uses a Serial ATA connection (150 MB/s per slot) to function as a drive. Now, the Raptor 10,000 RPM drives can sustain about 65-70 MB/s read speeds, and top end 7,200 RPM drives 50-55 MB/s. Any RAM drive that is connected by a Serial ATA is going to be limited by that to roughly twice the speed of a Raptor (with much faster seek times), no matter what OS you use.