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Linux On Solid State Disk

Posted by Hemos on from the prettty-cool-review dept.

Blah writes: "A while back Slashdot made reference to The Platypus Solid State Disk. The boys down at LinuxWorld.com.au have scored themselves one and given it a look over. The article has some pictures showing just how much SDRAM this thing has on it, as well as graphs which compare its IO and transfer rate performance against that of standard SCSI disk."

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ups and Downs by BJH · · Score: 5

    I don't think he's talking about systems actually required for flying the plane - things such as targeting systems (where information on which locations are planned targets could be valuable to the enemy) or map data (which would tell the enemy how much of their defense system has been located) would be more likely candidates for such treatment.

    Then again, it could just be that the Air Force doesn't like sharing its sooper-sekret pr0n files with anybody else.

  2. Re:What about the good old RAM Drive? by crgrace · · Score: 5
    What's the big deal? Am I just missing somehting? I'm really not trying to start a flame war here, I just don't get it...

    You are missing two things: speed and volatility.

    1. SPEED: A Solid-State hard disk is made out of static RAM (SRAM) not the dynamic RAM (DRAM) that consitutes the user RAM in a PC. SRAM is what is used in on-chip cache and is MUCH faster than DRAM because it stores information actively and has physical amplifiers in each memory cell (usually SR-latches), rather than passively storing the information on a capacitor as in DRAM. Because of this it is also much more expensive and burns more power than DRAM. That is why these solid-state hard disks are so expensive.

    2. VOLATILITY: When your computer crashes, or you shut it down, your RAM disk is GONE. This means you have to periodically write it to a physical hard-disk. With a solid-state hard disk, it looks to the computer just to be an amazingly fast hard drive, and no memory-management overhead is required. This is a big deal to large data warehouses and data mining operations.

    The real selling point to the solid-state hard drive is the speed. Internal SRAM can operate upwards of 1 GHz, and although it can't communicate with the outside world at that speed of course, with advanced high-speed digital signaling technologies you can achieve latencies and throughput unheard of with regular hard-disks and even DRAM based RAM-disks.