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On Mon, 22 Sep 1997 10:36:23 -0700, Paul Rubin wrote: > From: "Paul Khoury" <pkhoury@loop.com> > > Also, does anyone here (besides myself) use an ATA Flash RAM > card for use as extra storage? > >I have a 10 meg card and have been thinking of getting a larger >card if/when I can afford it. At present I'm not using the flash card >since it was in my Omnibook 300 which now has a broken screen :(((. >I can read the files from it under w95 but I prefer to run Linux. > >The idea of using flash is not as much to have "extra" storage as to >spin down the hard disk and have a machine I can use and access files >on without the noise of a rotating disk. My machine is a 755cx with >40MB of ram. What I'm thinking of doing is one of: > > 1) configure Linux to have 20 mb of regular ram and a 20 meg > ramdisk. At boot time, load the ramdisk with the most commonly > used system programs (for me, that means emacs :)) and spin down > the disk. My user files would be stored on the flash card. Then > I can edit, run "ls", etc. all from the ramdisk without needing > the HD, and when I write out files they go to the flash card so I > still don't need the HD. In case of a crash, my user files are > still saved in flash; the ramdisk contents get lost, but that's > ok since they're just copies of system programs that are on the > HD. I'm not sure how I'd set this up--maybe I'd have to put a > tiny root file system on the flash card, and mount the ramdisk to > some directory on it. > > 2) Give up on the ramdisk idea since it probably involves a lot of > configuration hassle. Buy a much bigger flash card (85 MB > Sandisk card = about $1000) and put a normal small system > installation on it including user files. 85 MB was a lot of > space even for a hard disk not that long ago :). Unfortunately > I haven't got the cash for this now. > For me, 60 MB is a lot of space. I still love getting old MFM, RLL, ESDI, SCSI, and IDE drives, because having 15 systems means no space. >In both cases, the hard disk would be NFS auto-mounted so when I need >a less commonly used file, it would spin up. All the directories in >my normal search path (/bin, /usr/bin, etc.) would be present in >ram or flash, but the less commonly need programs in them would be >replaced by symlinks pointing to the HD. That way if I mis-type a >command name, the HD won't spin up after the filename isn't found >in the ramdisk. > >Comments are welcome, especially ideas about how hard it would be to >carry out idea #1 above. I'm not that much of a Linux configuration >whiz. > Good luck, then. I can setup well, and use programs well, but I am NOT advanced. I'm better at OS/2, but I still enjoy Linux. >Note, one hassle with flash cards is their writing speed is a LOT >slower than hard disks. The current regular Sandisk cards write at >around 300K/sec which is 2x cd-rom speed. The new "double density" >cards are even slower at around 75k/sec (floppy speed), though they >come up to 160 MB (!) in a type 2 pcmcia card. But since I'd normally >just be writing out small files, the slow speed is probably ok. And the access time is good, like <3ms. Paul