boot xp from solid state storage

crowej

i have been thinking about trying this and i wanted to get your feedback.

booting xp from a cf card or something. as i understand it it should be alot faster than any hard drive ? is this true ?

i have found a sata to cf adapder.

really my question is would it be faster and if it would how fast

obsoviously i would move the my docs etc to another drive but the core os and some programs on the cf card.

what u think ?

secret_squirrel

crowej wrote:

i have been thinking about trying this and i wanted to get your feedback.

booting xp from a cf card or something. as i understand it it should be alot faster than any hard drive ? is this true ?

i have found a sata to cf adapder.

really my question is would it be faster and if it would how fast

obsoviously i would move the my docs etc to another drive but the core os and some programs on the cf card.

what u think ?

Down side of doing that is that XP's swap file will burn through the write life of your flash memory very fast indeed.... Flash memory has a fairly low* number of writes before it degrades.


*In comparison to a HD anyway. Its still many 10's of 1000's of writes afaik.


You might also want to investigate BartPE - an XP install on a CD or Flash memory.

You also need to make sure your MB supports booting from flash.

crowej

can i move the swap file to another disk ?

kdouglas

from http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11319_7-5555103-8.html
::

Also known as virtual memory, the swap file extends your PC's memory, holding information from real RAM on your hard drive as you work. By default, this file is written to drive C:, but you can improve performance and increase free space by moving it to a different partition. Right-click My Computer and select Properties > Advanced. In the Performance section, click Settings > Advanced and in the Virtual Memory section, click Change. Next to drive C:, the two numbers in the Paging File Size (MB) column indicate the minimum and maximum size limits of the current file.

To set up a new paging file on a different drive, highlight that drive letter and click either the Custom Size or System Managed Size radio button. The Custom Size button lets you specify the desired size. (Two to three times the size of your RAM is a good starting point.) If space is plentiful, set the initial and maximum sizes to the same value so that Windows doesn't have to dynamically adjust the file size. Or choose System Managed Size to let Windows do the job on its own.

Once you've configured the new swap file, click Set, then highlight drive C:. Click No Paging File to delete the old file on that drive and click Set again.

wasnt sure if it was possible myself, but a quick google found the info above

crowej

legend,

so the only question no is will it be faster ? than a sata drive on the boot ?

Stephen

Well, how fast can the flash card you have read/write? I'd bet its a lot slower than a hard disk, as most compact flash type memory cards are designed for portability rather than performance.

Wolverine_1999

What about the program files? Documents and settings? How big is your flash drive? XP takes about 1.5GB in total...

kippy

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
Check out the hyperdrive.
This is what you are looking for
Or something similiar.

Wolverine_1999

kippy wrote:

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
Check out the hyperdrive.
This is what you are looking for
Or something similiar.

wow that is cool

SouperComputer

The latency of flash should be better, but the bandwidth, espcially on writes is VERY slow compared to HD.

Flash is really only used with computers that are being used for a specific use such as a media player to decreace thermal and power requirments.

DemonOfTheFall

You can get 20 MB a second flash now, I can't imagine it being much slower than an average hard drive. Doubt it'd be faster though.

SolarNexus

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

You can get 20 MB a second flash now, I can't imagine it being much slower than an average hard drive. Doubt it'd be faster though.

IIRC the read/write speed of an EIDE drive is approx 115mbps (excluding overheads), so... I think you might notice a difference.

I've thought about this before, but the only advantage is protected storage (cant write to OS, cant corrupt it) but this outright rules out any solidstate which doesnt have write-protect. Even at that, getting an os which boots from one disk, then uses another as its Hq is gonna be a nightmare.

I think the answer is this: solid state is for embedded systems (pda's, internet cafe 'boxes') only, elsewise its a waste of money, time, and resources.

JPA

Surely in the near or distant future all hard drives will use solid state storage.

Silent and with no moving parts.

SolarNexus

JPA wrote:

Surely in the near or distant future all hard drives will use solid state storage.

Silent and with no moving parts.

they've been saying that since the early 80's

DemonOfTheFall

SolarNexus wrote:

IIRC the read/write speed of an EIDE drive is approx 115mbps (excluding overheads), so... I think you might notice a difference.

No, thats quite alot faster than your average desktop hard drive. A LOT faster.

I just benchmarked my drive with SiSoft Sandra, 7200rpm Maxtor Diamondmax 9 160 GB. 30MB/s read speed. The "database" result they quote that comes with the program is 29 MB/s,

For a reference point for 115 MB/s, Sandra tells me that you'd need 2 uber 15000rpm SCSI drives in RAID 0.

SolarNexus

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

No, thats quite alot faster than your average desktop hard drive. A LOT faster.

I just benchmarked my drive with SiSoft Sandra, 7200rpm Maxtor Diamondmax 9 160 GB. 30MB/s read speed. The "database" result they quote that comes with the program is 29 MB/s,

For a reference point for 115 MB/s, Sandra tells me that you'd need 2 uber 15000rpm SCSI drives in RAID 0.

your right, I must have been thinking of the maxiumum throughput of EIDE as a technology, ignoring that harddrives rarely push these limits (if ever)

DemonOfTheFall

Yeah easy mistake to make. All the hard drive and mobo manufacturers would love to have us thinking that SATA-2 hard drives can manage 300 megs a second!

Mutant_Fruit

Remember 115mbps = 14.375 megaBYTES a second. I'm pretty sure my IDE HD can average well over that....

ShiverinEskimo

"they" weren't doing anyone any favours when they created bits and decided to call a collection of 8 bits something beginning with "B" that it oh so similar to "bits".

Muppets I tells you.