Obsolete Hard drive

[onesource]

New fleshdrives are coming into the market replacing the old spinners, I'm interested in them they sound really good.
Should be good for our business.

[Ken]

Fleshdrives? Gottts get me two of those..Flashdrives? yep..
Ken

[onesource]

Ha! sorry it must have been subliminal:Big LaughFleshdrives? Gottts get me two of those..Flashdrives? yep..
Ken

[visionsigns]

Yeah you might want to wait a while until the prices come down a *little*.

Here's an 128GB solid state hard drive for only $3,249.00.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609245

[John M]

Here's some good reading:

http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/

While the $3300 drive may be more than you want to spend, a few $800 16 gig drives in RAID may be the middle ground you're looking for. It'd make a killer swap / temp drive!

The article shows the importance of choosing a good RAID controller too. 830 megs / second of sustained speed is downright amazing.

[jiarby]

my flash drive (8gb) is dog slow at write operations. Dont want a HDD like that.

[Replicator]

Waiting for a good firewire flash drive to carry around with me . . . !

[B Snyder]

my flash drive (8gb) is dog slow at write operations. Dont want a HDD like that.

Thats because your flash drive is running data through a USB port.

[B Snyder]

Waiting for a good firewire flash drive to carry around with me . . . !

Why? Isn't USB 2.0 faster than firewire?

[Replicator]

Why? Isn't USB 2.0 faster than firewire?

Hell know !

USB is dependant on drivers and Firewire is Plug-n-Play . . . !

Much Faster !

[B Snyder]

I didn't know that. Is your computer using Firewire 1394b?

[kraigsnowden]

It distributes the packets differently. I do video on the side too, and I read up on that cause I can't capture video to a USB 2.0. They say it's "faster" but it's not for video. Whatever that means. I have the new firewire 800 I think it is, on my mac...and that's just like runnin' an internal HD. I'd LOVE to get my hands on a firewire jump drive that would run on that sucker!

[John M]

It's important to note that the speed of these solid state drives isn't any quicker than "normal" drives when used singly. Their advantage is that they scale nearly perfectly when used in RAID, something normal drives don't do.

Instead of 3 drives giving you twice the performance of 1, three drives will give you three times the performance and it grows as you add drives. By the time you reach 6 or 8 drives, that's some incredible speed and it isn't peak or burst -- it's sustained throughput of over a full CD worth of data every second.

Right now it's pretty expensive for not much (relative) storage. That'll change as time goes on. I'll bet that in a year or two it'll be common to see a few of these drives in higher end machines.

[signage]

These flash drives are also not a fragile as the old spinning/platter drives!

[Bogie]

Why not...

I remember in the dark ages, we could set up virtual drives in RAM... You know - that 384K that we couldn't use between the 640K that Gates gave us, and the 1024 that we actually had paid for? In fact, I knew folks who were running 8 megabyte "cache drives" on their 286 machines...

I'm guessing that mommyboard memory, or even cardbased memory, would be faster than going out to a flash device, even one running over SATA?

[John M]

In 1987 I set up my Apple IIGS to use 800k of its 2 MB (upgraded) memory as a RAM disk. I then copied the boot disk to that area and rebooted. It only lasted till I turned the machine off but it was light years ahead of disk-based access -- and I had the ultra-moden dual 3.5 + dual 5.25 setup :biggrin:

If you had enough raw RAM to use as a drive it'd be faster than just about any add-on card you can use. Thanks to your post I'll now be researching the idea of loading a motherboard w/ 8 gigs of DDR2 and then dedicating 5 gigs of it to a RAM disk, keeping XP happy with "only" 3 gigs available.

Here's a chart (not mine) showing the relative bandwidth of various connections & specifications: http://www.d-silence.com/articles/graphics/speedlg.jpg

[onesource]

Interesting I'll be researching also. It will be a couple of years before there is an affordable release of flashdrives