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Couldn't you set the swap to run on a Fast Flash Disk? That would allow for faster swapping (or paging for the Winders crowd). I've been meaning to try this, but I don't know how much they cost.

check m-systems http://www.m-sys.com/ they have a 176G flash scsi disk there, also a 'low cost' 8G ide flash drive in 1.8 and 2.5" so how is this news exactly ?

Also check out http://www.m-sys.com/

They do offer solid state drives in ATA and SCSI format too among other such products.

For instance the M-Systems' Fast Flash Disk (FFD) Supports up to 34 GB website . Never tried it myself but it seems simpler than trying to roll your own. Also you can debug and develop with a conventional HD and switch to ramdisk only when necessary. I suspect there will be performance problems using the 32GB of a 4 processor board as a single extent of RAM.

Hmm, then I wonder why the largest compact flash cards are actually just containers for micro hard disks...

Flash memory density is increasing rapily, but so is the cost. Look at solid state drives from M-Systems

Typical flash today is good for a million writes per cell.

You wish. It's more like 10.000. 1.000.000 is the figure for EEPROM, but there the access time is quite a bit longer.

Googling for flash mtbf turns up this site, which claims 1e6 program/erase cycles and 1e6 hours MTBF, and this site, which claims 5e6 program/erase cycles and 1.8e6 hour MTBF for their 1 GB flash disc, 1.0e6 hour MTBF for their 6 GB flash disc. Others claim MTBF figures such as 5e5 and 8e5 hours.

Just in case you guys are curious how the pigeons carried their data!

M-System, Israeli Company that produces tiny memory cards. They supplied 64 tiny DiskOnChips, each with 64MB (megabytes) of storage space". The availability of high density small size flash memory, enables the transfer of very large quantities of data in physical form. A capsule containing 20-22 chips was attached to each pigeon. In total, the 3 pigeons carried chips with a capacity of 4GB.

Have a look at m-systems their Disk On Key seems to support USB booting according to their literature.

Capacity [KB] * Erase Cycles / Total Data Update Rate [KB/Day] = Lifespan (days) Using TFFS, not FAT Lifespan Calc Here Here

In case of slashdotting. No favors They've decided to go it alone, without venture capital. Meet some Israeli bootstrap start-ups. Batya Feldman 1 Dec 0316:54 In recent years, there have been quite a few entrepreneurs wandering around with good ideas (at least in their heads), but unable to raise capital. There are no more angels willing to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars. The number of venture capital funds making seed investments has sharply contracted, and those still willing to invest do so only after long and painstaking study, especially in cases of entrepreneurs without prior experience.

The chasm between the supply of technology entrepreneurs and the demand for them is evidence that the great high-tech and venture capital crisis did not suppress the spirit of the average Israeli entrepreneur. Last week, Walden Israel general partner Eyal Kaplan told "Globes" that following a lecture at the Israel Center for Management (MIL) start-up forum, he was handed 17 business plans by new companies seeking financing. The situation is similar at other funds that have announced plans to make seed investments.

But it turns out that there is another way, too: "bootstrap companies" in the venture capital jargon. These are entrepreneurs who simply go it alone rather than making the rounds from one venture capital fund to another. To those who wonder, the phrase originated in the tales of Baron Munchausen, who described how he saved himself from drowning by using his own bootstraps. Translated into the language of high-tech, the concept refers to a company that finances itself. No venture capital and no directors. Can you imagine?

It was possible to find such Israeli companies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the domestic venture capital industry began to flourish. Dov Moran's M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers (Nasdaq: FLSH) and Yanki Margalit's Aladdin Knowledge Systems (Nasdaq: ALDN) were just two of the companies that established themselves almost without external financing. They developed an idea, then a product, and initial sales were miniscule. Company growth was directly related to success on the market.

"The funds were in the bunker"

Nir Ben-Halevy and Oren Rossen are the entrepreneurs and sole employees of start-up Huminity. Rossen was previously an analyst at Investec Israel (TASE:INSI) and Ben-Halevey was a member of the high-tech team at Deloitte and Touche - Brightman Almagor. Over a year ago, they decided to found a company based on the concept of a social networking product that combines chat and instant messaging, enabling users to share their personal networks.

After a brief round among the venture capital funds, they realized that they could not raise money and decided to go it alone. Ben-Halevy reminisces, "A year ago, it was simply impossible to raise money from the funds. They had gone down into the bunker. We believed that if we had a working product, their attitude might change. We believed that we could get it up and running on our own."

Ben-Halevy and Rossen left everything behind, moved to Turkey to lower costs and for the past year dedicated themselves to developing the product. Last month, they announced that they had raised $2 million, at a company value of $10 million, after money, from the same venture capital funds they had approached previously. The deal is now being closed. This time, they came to the funds with a working product and 400,000 registered users.

"We did everything very cheaply. We developed the product on an open source code system. It's true that Oracle's (Nasdaq:ORCL) system is more stable, but on the other hand we don't pay a $5,000 a month license fee," says Ben-Halevy. Huminity's open code-based product also allows the company to obtain the help of the operators com

You could try M-Systems's products like DiskOnChip or even their IDE/SCSI Flash Disks.

I'm working with embedded systems (Linux) in my company and I'm very pleased with the DiskOnChips despite their half-proprietary driver with which you can only generate kernel modules, not compile it into the kernel for legalese reasons. The DiskOnChips work way more reliable than any other flash chips I've used so far, with no defects yet (and we use them just like normal hard-disks currently).

Granted, it could be just that we had bad luck with the other flash chips we tried before, I don't know enough about the flash market / flash chips in general.

Disclaimer: No, I didn't get paid for this "advertising", but I wouldn't mind if someone would do it nevertheless ;-)

You could try M-Systems's products like DiskOnChip or even their IDE/SCSI Flash Disks.

I'm working with embedded systems (Linux) in my company and I'm very pleased with the DiskOnChips despite their half-proprietary driver with which you can only generate kernel modules, not compile it into the kernel for legalese reasons. The DiskOnChips work way more reliable than any other flash chips I've used so far, with no defects yet (and we use them just like normal hard-disks currently).

Granted, it could be just that we had bad luck with the other flash chips we tried before, I don't know enough about the flash market / flash chips in general.

Disclaimer: No, I didn't get paid for this "advertising", but I wouldn't mind if someone would do it nevertheless ;-)

You could try M-Systems's products like DiskOnChip or even their IDE/SCSI Flash Disks.

I'm working with embedded systems (Linux) in my company and I'm very pleased with the DiskOnChips despite their half-proprietary driver with which you can only generate kernel modules, not compile it into the kernel for legalese reasons. The DiskOnChips work way more reliable than any other flash chips I've used so far, with no defects yet (and we use them just like normal hard-disks currently).

Granted, it could be just that we had bad luck with the other flash chips we tried before, I don't know enough about the flash market / flash chips in general.

Disclaimer: No, I didn't get paid for this "advertising", but I wouldn't mind if someone would do it nevertheless ;-)

300mhz Geode processor (I have seen up to P3 700mhz boards)

256 memory

512 flash drive (for OS)

compact flash (why use a HD?)

OS? Windows to linux to a half a dozen others..

for under 600$

Hmm, now I may have to tinker and build a car PC now... in any case.. I will have 10 of the above in a month :)

info to get ya started:

kontron
winsystems
arcon
versalogic
m-systems (storage)

M-Systems makes a device called the Disk-on-Chip that I believe can do this. Although it doesn't interface through IDE, it can be made to emulate a hard drive at the BIOS level, using M-Sys's TrueFFS BIOS. Therefore, operating systems (like Windows 98, I believe) that use BIOS calls to access the hard drive can use the Disk-on-Chip as if it were a hard drive. Other operating systems like Windows NT and Linux need the proper drivers / kernel modules to access the disk. The upshot of all of this is that I was able to get my own hacked-up minidistribution of GNU/Linux (which I naturally called Asshat Linux), to boot and run off of the 16-Megabyte Disk-on-Chip in a Visara 1783 thin client machine (formerly running QNX). I believe that the same could be done for Windows 98. If anyone wants info on how I did this, email me or post a reply.

What if you could boot from this drive?

You can't.

If it were Flash Ram

It isn't. The drive uses volitile DRAM.

Wishing that a product was something completely different is useless speculation. Wishing a different product existed and affordable is different. M-Systems make solid state flash disks. A 4GB IDE flash disk costs about $3500 USD.

Many of us aren't "missing the point." This DRAM disk as sold is not particularly usefull except purhaps in some limit roles. (I will note that I have yet to read a post where this device is better then more system ram.)

The idea of storeing your system state at boot and loading that at boot has potential. My compture has a hibernate mode already where the system state is stored to disk and reloaded at boot time. I find that it isn't much faster to return from a hibernate state then to reboot in the first place . I am not sure how much faster booting as you propose would actually be.

The important question is why do you care so much about your reboot times? Specifically why would you want to spend so much money simply to increase your boot times? I reboot my laptop fairly often as I prefer to leave it off while the laptop is being transported. The boot times don't bother me. What I would spend money on is a faster hard drive. A faster hard drive would speed up boot times, and increase overall system performance.

>Unfortunately, using Fat32 or NTFS(if you
>were "Gasp" running nt/2k), you would be
>repeatledy using the same flash sectors,
>quickly burning them out.

Thats why M-System's Disk on chip has it's TrueFFS file system, which "Prolongs Flash Life Span: TrueFFS dramatically prolongs device lifetime by using advanced dynamic and static wear-leveling algorithms".
Meaning: even if the OS thinks its writing to the same sectors on disk, the flash system is smart enough to scatter repeated writes across the chip. So effectively you dont write to the same areas all the time. Check out their online disk life span calculator.

>Unfortunately, using Fat32 or NTFS(if you
>were "Gasp" running nt/2k), you would be
>repeatledy using the same flash sectors,
>quickly burning them out.

Thats why M-System's Disk on chip has it's TrueFFS file system, which "Prolongs Flash Life Span: TrueFFS dramatically prolongs device lifetime by using advanced dynamic and static wear-leveling algorithms".
Meaning: even if the OS thinks its writing to the same sectors on disk, the flash system is smart enough to scatter repeated writes across the chip. So effectively you dont write to the same areas all the time. Check out their online disk life span calculator.

That fanless chasis would be a good match for VIA's Eden platform is an x86 motherboard/CPU/ethernet/sound/gfx combo that runs cool enough to only need a passive aluminum heatsink for cooling. Not only that, its going to cost around $100 for a basically complete computer! This means that the only noise generated by your computer would be the harddrive. Of course, if you wanted, you could use one of those solid state flash memory based harddrives, which would make for a totally silent computer.

Since the Eden platform has TV-outs, it would make a great set top box for playing emulated NES and SNES games, in addition to MP3s and DIVX movies.

DOC is DiskOnChip, from M-Systems. It's a flash memory chip that can replace the BIOS chip and provide some amount of nonvolatile storage.

Their magic is in their BIOS "enhancement" code that makes the flash memory appear as a bootable disk drive. In DOS, it shows up as C:, and they have boot code for several operating systems, including Linux. Linux drivers for mounting/writing the filesystem are also available.

Second, you don't need a PCMCIA slot to use CompactFlash as a boot device. CompactFlash is already IDE-compliant and can be directly plugged into the IDE controller with the right adapter. They run about $20 from places like this.

The CompactFlash solution would give you a removable boot device that could be easily mounted/read on any other system. The DOC is smaller, but more convenient since it's already integrated.

M-Systems offers offer some Flash-based "DiskOnChip" products used alot in embedded apps.

M-Systems offers offer some Flash-based "DiskOnChip" products used alot in embedded apps.

A family of high performance, single-chip flash disks are available in a wide range of capacities from M-systems.

• DiskOnChip (basically flash that looks like an IDE hard drive, usually used for embedded systems, hence the DIP package. Probably expensive.
• A small (8MB or smaller is fine) CompactFlash card. CompactFlash presents itself to the system as an IDE drive interface. So all you have to do is load a bootable filesystem on it.
• A network card that can boot from a LAN. 3Com cards (even the $30 ones) can do this. Many other cards can too. You'll need to figure out how to configure a BOOTP and TFTP servers on your Linux server to get this to work.
• Possibly the cheapest option (if your motherboard permits it) is to use LinuxBIOS to actually put a full Linux kernel into the flash memory already on your motherboard, replacing the BIOS. Presumably, you would build a kernel that supports your network card, so all you would have to do is pass the "root=/dev/nfs,nfsroot=serverip:/dir" option to the kernel at boot time.

Oh yeah, any of these would be faster than reading a kernel image from a floppy disk. Also the machine would be less vulnerable to tampering.

Cryptnotic

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"M-Systems recently released a new TrueFFS driver for DiskOnChip that includes support for Linux kernel 2.4.X. The new driver can be used as an integral part of the Linux kernel or as a General Public License (GPL)-compliant loadable module. The loadable module approach enables commercial distribution of Linux-based systems using DiskOnChip and M-Systems TrueFFS drivers, while complying with Linux's GPL terms and conditions.

The new driver includes source files of the driver layer that enable developers with custom Linux kernels to modify the DiskOnChip driver layer to work with their unique version of Linux and maintain GPL terms. Using this driver as a loadable module also enables faster integration of DiskOnChip within Linux-based systems thus allowing faster time to market."

Source: M-System's press release

I wonder if it's the M-Systems USB Flash Disk on Key product...

Me an a budy had an idea for a product based on one of these devices last fall. When we contacted them, they said IBM had bought out there entire production for the next few quarters. Sorry we have no engineering samples to sell you. (and no it was not the IBM product, it was an idea I thought was marginal but worth trying and may still happen...)

Makes me wonder...

TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken

M-Systems has had a real presence at the few embedded linux conferences I've seen. Worth looking at M-Systems other FLASH storage devices for those embedded apps.

I have one of these things. And, it's really funny too because I already packed mine up and was planning on sending it back to them - then I got the email telling me that they were being discontinued. So, lucky for me now I don't have to pay shipping back to them! Actually I'm hoping they'll let us keep the damn thing and just forget about it. Is it really worth spending the time on? I took mine apart soon after I got it. It has an M-Systems Disk On Chip 2000 64Mb flash memory card with embedded Linux. I have found a site from an EE where he talks about hacking it - check it out here. It's got an open IDE connector but the question was always the BIOS. Nobody has ever successfully removed the DiskOnChip and gotten the iBrow (aka "Webplayer") to boot. Apparently the BIOS has a password that noone has been able to hack yet. The message boards over on the Linux-hacker site have a section dedicated to the Virgin Webplayer. But, as far as I know the project has advanced very far. When I took it apart, the only thing I reall wanted out of it was the Samsung flat panel LCD screen. Oh well.. we'll see what happens

Adtron's fits in a drive bay.

How about a Texas Micro Pentium single board computer with CompactFlash?

Here is a CF-to-IDE converter for mounting on a PC/104 stack. $150.

And here are three more from Advantech including an IDE CompactFlash module.

M-Systems also has IDE CompactFlash disks.

Anyone know if the following are OS dependent?

Instead of an ISA IDE/FD card, this PC Card/FD card. Or this 4-card PC Card ISA card.

Keep in mind that flash can only be written to 300,000 times or so. Avoid swapping to it, and probably best to not update file access times ("atime").

• 16MB-$20US
• 40MB-$120US
• 72MB-$290US
• (price exponential up to 144 MB)

They also have some sort of SSD embedded in a DIMM chip that they claim is usable with Linux.

• 16MB-$20US
• 40MB-$120US
• 72MB-$290US
• (price exponential up to 144 MB)

They also have some sort of SSD embedded in a DIMM chip that they claim is usable with Linux.

we use DiskOnChip2000 here at works, M-System make also SSD like quantum's one (IDE)

check m-sys it's cheaper than quantum i think
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no, take a DiskOnChip, go to m-system
there's industrial SBC (single board computer) or "biscuit PC" that can handle all this
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