Is Flash Memory Bootable?

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Is Flash Memory Bootable?

can you chuck the hard drive for flash cards?

aias1975

7:54 pm on Feb 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

Can I use flash cards as my main "hard drive"?
Can you boot from them?

dingman

8:32 pm on Feb 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

It's certainly possible. I'm pretty sure there are even solid-state devices that use an IDE interface, which makes it quite easy. Capacity is pretty low compared to a mechanical hard disk at the same price, though. Depending on the application I might try to do a net boot instead.

jdMorgan

8:37 pm on Feb 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

dingman,

Major shortcomings are cost/bit and finite lifespan. They were at 100,000 writes per location the last time I actually read a data sheet - several years ago.

Try searching for SanDisk - they make small flash-EEPROM-based "hard drives" targeted at mobile and industrial applications.

Jim

dingman

2:29 am on Feb 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

They were at 100,000 writes per location

Deffinitely not what you want for your primary HD if it's still in that ball park. I haven't ever used one, since the cost issue was enough to keep me from looking into it with any seriousness. None of the places I've worked have had those kinds of needs, and I haven't had the buget to just play with it anyway.

ggrot

4:22 am on Feb 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

For a bootable device, you may only need reads. Perhaps the OS keeps everything in RAM and doesnt need non-volatile memory. My question though, is why would you want to. A flash card large enough to hold an OS and some software would be more expensive than a small hard drive IMHO.

Dreamquick

8:43 am on Feb 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

If you are really interested in this have a search for USB flash drives which are essentially a self-contained chunk of flash memory with a USB interface attached. The largest ones I've seen so far are 512MB but I'm sure with enough time you'll see GBs released.

The interesting thing is that a number of these can be used as bootable devices if your bios supports it, and although you still have that write limit you can write-protect the device and use it as a glorified boot disk.

-Tony

aias1975

4:14 am on Feb 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

I guess the write lifetime isn't good enough for primetime.
I just want to chuck my HD, they fail, are noisy, waste energy, and I save everything of value to cd anyway. But with prices halving every few months per mb, I think flash has real potential. It would be cool to run my site from a memory card instead of a hard drive.