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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. > > 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. > > 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. It seems to me that this is a great idea that could greatly extend the battery life, and make the machine quite. These are both huge pluses. I dont think it is as hard as you think. What you need to do (as I understand it, as a non professional linux user), is to move the real-time stuff to the card, namely the stuff that accesses the disk. If you made links to the files /etc/crontab, and used the hard disk spin down program, it would all work. You might not even need the memory card. Just make a ramdrive from regular memory, with these few files that are frequently accessed by the kernel, and that would solve the "problem." I like it, and I think it might even work. Lets look at this harder. jont -- ==> NOTE NEW ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER: Jont B. Allen, Room B009; 973(or 201)/360-8545voice, x8092fax; http://www.research.att.com/~jba; AT&T Labs-Research 180 Park AV; PO Box 971; Florham Park NJ 07932-0971