[openbeos] Re: AW: Re: Haiku on Asus eeePC

On 10/30/07, Ronny Wisor <RonnyWisor@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Jonas
>
> as far as I know these new flash-discs/Solid State Discs (SSD) are not the
> same like a normal CF- or SD cards. They are optimised to support reading
> and writing like a normal harddisk and can transfer 40 MB/s. I have seen it
> on the CeBit in Hannover this year.
>
> Best regards
>            Ronny
>

Yes, the solid state drives use a different material than regular
flash drives and typically survive through many more read/write
cycles.  Flash is also optimized towards reading and writing large
blocks (closer to the size of a digital photo), and the solid state
drives handle small files much better.

One other option that is available over flash is a ramdisk.  A
compressed system image is stored on flash, at bootup it is read into
a ramdisk and the flash is not used again until shutdown, where the
ramdisk is compressed and stored back on the flash.  I have used
minimalistic Linux distributions designed this way from a 512-1024MB
USB flash drive and have generally been impressed with the performance
on small\embedded systems (with the current price of memory so low
compared to the price of solid-state storage, it's not too expensive
to have a system with 5GB of ramdisk and 1GB of RAM).  Haiku's boot
loader probably isn't at the point where it can handle something that
complicated yet, but I'm a major fan of small form factor and embedded
systems and I'm eager to try something like that in the future.  The
eeePC and VIA's Epia line of boards look like they could be good
candidates for experimentation.

-Ben

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