EDIT: Woops, forgot to select the right formatting
As most slashdotters know, a very large amount of boot time is the result of your systems hard disk speed. Replacing the hard disk that the OS boots from with something faster speeds up boot time dramatically.
There are some products out there already that emulate ATA and SATA drives, but using DRAM (with battery) or Flash to store the actual data instead.
The down side to the RAM solution is it obviously needs a backup battery installed on the card in the case your system is unplugged from the wall socket. If OSs were written to be "RAM-boot-device-aware" this problem could be reduced by storing copies of the nessecary boot files and restoring them from the actual harddisk should they go missing.
As for why computers are still slow to boot today, my best guess is costs. Right now, adding one of these devices to your pc costs more than some people are willing to pay just for a faster bootup time. As memory continues to get cheaper id be willing to bet we will gradually see more pcs with some form of dedicated boot drive. (This is assuming the harddisk isn't replaced by the magical holographic storage we keep hearing about any time soon). The second half of the battle for faster boot speeds is the software support to negate the down sides. RAM based boot drives would need to be backed up to harddisks and flash based drives may need the OS to be aware of the limitation on writes.
As most slashdotters know, a very large amount of boot time is the result of your systems hard disk speed. Replacing the hard disk that the OS boots from with something faster speeds up boot time dramatically.
There are some products out there already that emulate ATA and SATA drives, but using DRAM (with battery) or Flash to store the actual data instead.
PQI have some flash based ones here: http://www.pqimemory.com/products-storage.asp [pqimemory.com]
Gigabyte have a product called i-ram which is the DRAM based solution here: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=24 80 [anandtech.com]
The down side to the RAM solution is it obviously needs a backup battery installed on the card in the case your system is unplugged from the wall socket. If OSs were written to be "RAM-boot-device-aware" this problem could be reduced by storing copies of the necessary boot files and restoring them from the actual hard disk should they go missing.
As for why computers are still slow to boot today, my best guess is costs. Right now, adding one of these devices to your pc costs more than some people are willing to pay just for a faster boot up time. As memory continues to get cheaper id be willing to bet we will gradually see more pcs with some form of dedicated boot drive. (This is assuming the hard disk isn't replaced by the magical holographic storage we keep hearing about any time soon). The second half of the battle for faster boot speeds is the software support to negate the down sides. RAM based boot drives would need to be backed up to hard disks and flash based drives may need the OS to be aware of the limitation on writes.
Instead of printing this data onto paper, why not just store it loslessly in a bitmap file? After all, printers only have a certain DPI and a certain amount of colours. If you could take this bitmap file and somehow extract 256GB of data from it, that sure would be some cool magic.
Slashdot Mirror
EDIT: Woops, forgot to select the right formatting
4 80
As most slashdotters know, a very large amount of boot time is the result of your systems hard disk speed. Replacing the hard disk that the OS boots from with something faster speeds up boot time dramatically.
There are some products out there already that emulate ATA and SATA drives, but using DRAM (with battery) or Flash to store the actual data instead.
PQI have some flash based ones here: http://www.pqimemory.com/products-storage.asp
Gigabyte have a product called i-ram which is the DRAM based solution here: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
The down side to the RAM solution is it obviously needs a backup battery installed on the card in the case your system is unplugged from the wall socket. If OSs were written to be "RAM-boot-device-aware" this problem could be reduced by storing copies of the nessecary boot files and restoring them from the actual harddisk should they go missing.
As for why computers are still slow to boot today, my best guess is costs. Right now, adding one of these devices to your pc costs more than some people are willing to pay just for a faster bootup time. As memory continues to get cheaper id be willing to bet we will gradually see more pcs with some form of dedicated boot drive. (This is assuming the harddisk isn't replaced by the magical holographic storage we keep hearing about any time soon). The second half of the battle for faster boot speeds is the software support to negate the down sides. RAM based boot drives would need to be backed up to harddisks and flash based drives may need the OS to be aware of the limitation on writes.
As most slashdotters know, a very large amount of boot time is the result of your systems hard disk speed. Replacing the hard disk that the OS boots from with something faster speeds up boot time dramatically. There are some products out there already that emulate ATA and SATA drives, but using DRAM (with battery) or Flash to store the actual data instead. PQI have some flash based ones here: http://www.pqimemory.com/products-storage.asp [pqimemory.com] Gigabyte have a product called i-ram which is the DRAM based solution here: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=24 80 [anandtech.com]
The down side to the RAM solution is it obviously needs a backup battery installed on the card in the case your system is unplugged from the wall socket. If OSs were written to be "RAM-boot-device-aware" this problem could be reduced by storing copies of the necessary boot files and restoring them from the actual hard disk should they go missing.
As for why computers are still slow to boot today, my best guess is costs. Right now, adding one of these devices to your pc costs more than some people are willing to pay just for a faster boot up time. As memory continues to get cheaper id be willing to bet we will gradually see more pcs with some form of dedicated boot drive. (This is assuming the hard disk isn't replaced by the magical holographic storage we keep hearing about any time soon). The second half of the battle for faster boot speeds is the software support to negate the down sides. RAM based boot drives would need to be backed up to hard disks and flash based drives may need the OS to be aware of the limitation on writes.
This story is a hoax.
Lets just imagine for one second that its true.
Instead of printing this data onto paper, why not just store it loslessly in a bitmap file? After all, printers only have a certain DPI and a certain amount of colours. If you could take this bitmap file and somehow extract 256GB of data from it, that sure would be some cool magic.