Firmware Memory for O/S's?

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Sunin

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - August 2008
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Dec 27, 2005
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Any thoughts on why we have not seen an emergence of memory modules that their sole purpose is to house the operating system? I mean for 200-400 bucks you could get memory modules and have them house operating systems like winxp. Wouldn't a read only memory with firmware update capability be a helluva lot faster then a HD? I mean couldn't then operating system reads be sped up to the Nth degree? Wouldn't this also speed up gaming, applications, etc?

Why haven't we started exploring this possibility? I mean instead of getting a CD you would get 1 or 2 sets of memory that you would plug into your mobo? Of course these would be in addition to the ram you currently have on the mobo.

Thoughts?
 
I may be really wrong on this, but I thought the reason why it hasn't happened (aside from cost) is the fact that flash memory doesn't last as long, and would eventually degrade under the read/write actions that would be needed.

There has already been some sites explaining how to get XP running on a flash drive, but given the USB interface limitations, the performance has been horrid at best.
 
These have been around for years. The reason they aren't more popular is because they do little more than allow you to boot up faster (at which point the OS is loaded in memory).
 
I'm all for booting up faster! Wouldn't the side effect be mroe then just bootup. I mean for instance HD calls for operating system functions would be eliminated, thus allowing the only access to be the app your running. The basis for this thought process was a previous forum thread that discussed about putting your op on a seperate HD from your gaming HD nets performance gains. Plus our bios on the motherboard does not seem to degrade over numerous years.

Also just some guesses on performance gains? 20-30%? I could see these being used on high-end rigs.
 
Sunin said:
Plus our bios on the motherboard does not seem to degrade over numerous years.
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The BIOS isn't written to and read from anywhere near the amount of times that an OS would do in one boot. I've seen flash memory be rated for 1000 writes, which seems awfully low to me. I do know, if you sat a typical hard drive next to flash memory, and started the same read/write operations on both, the flash memory would crap out much much sooner.

Hard drive caches are increasing however, and Vista supposedly is going to have a feature that allows caching some boot data to a flash drive...but I'm not sure if that's been finalized yet.
 
Compact flash will spread writes to avoid overloading some cells early, and has some redundancy built in. Something like that, and only writing when there is an OS update, should last more than long enough. I think the reads are more or less harmless?

It shouldn't be that hard to keep the parts that need to be written to during a normal boot on something that can handle it.
 
mngl1200 said:
Amiga did it years ago....
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no AMiga had WorkBench on an EEPROM, and the full desktop then loaded from floppy/HD
To do an upgrade with Amiga (say WB2.9 to WB3.0) involved not only an EEPROM swap but a floppy swap

fastest boot to a decent desktop I have ever seen!!!


flash is ok, it can be read from without a problem, it is the writing that is the issue
 
eeyrjmr said:
no AMiga had WorkBench on an EEPROM, and the full desktop then loaded from floppy/HD
To do an upgrade with Amiga (say WB2.9 to WB3.0) involved not only an EEPROM swap but a floppy swap

fastest boot to a decent desktop I have ever seen!!!


flash is ok, it can be read from without a problem, it is the writing that is the issue
Click to expand...

Overall I am just surprised that gains in this area have not been more readily explored. I mean CPU's are one thing, HD's are a bottle neck, eliminating some of that just seems logical to me. Hrmph.. who knows.
 
What I thought was interesting in that article was that it was not that much faster then the HD's in most tests. A SATA II version with full 300mb/s and DDR2 support would probably make me venture there when I do my new build in 9mos.
 
Sunin said:
What I thought was interesting in that article was that it was not that much faster then the HD's in most tests. A SATA II version with full 300mb/s and DDR2 support would probably make me venture there when I do my new build in 9mos.
Click to expand...

It's a old review and I'm sure there is a version 2 somewhere so google it or check gigabyte site.
 
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