Faster Boot Times By Reducing 'Suspend' Latency?

Miles asks: "I'm planning to building a car MP3/DVD/Navigation/RealTimeAutomobileDiagnostic System. I've decided to use Windows95/98/ME as the OS, for the software I want to run. I've seen similar car computers that take 30 seconds or more to boot, however I want to get the boot time down to 10 seconds. I plan to use "suspend to disk" instead of just powering off the computer to achieve this and it'll just reload memory from the hard drive. I tried to search for HD's that have low spin-up times, but high transfer rates, and have come up empty. IBM's microdrive has a 0.5s spin up time, but only reads at 4MB/s. Another option is flash memory that simulates an IDE drive, but the maximum transfer rate I've seen is 8MB/s. Larger drives can read at 50MB/s, but take 8 seconds to spin up. Does anyone know of a storage medium that can be written to everytime the computer is shut off, and started up and read from in under 10 seconds (the less the better)?"

"Capacity is not an issue (as long as it is 64MB or more), because I'll have a separate conventional drive to store data. If there are better options than using suspend-to-disk, please tell me about them."

Comments

Brave man

[rjamestaylor]

It takes a brave man to admit to Slashdot users you want to use Windows for your product's OS... ;-)

How about a CF card that (or EEPROM??) that contains enough to get the session started while the other media spins up? The "state" would be maintained on the instant-on media. There might be a small delay to complete functionality but it will appear to be instant on (which is the real need, I my opinion).

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