Main > Main Forum

booting a mame cab really fast....

<< < (2/5) > >>

krick:

--- Quote from: SirPoonga on October 03, 2005, 05:43:57 pm ---
--- Quote from: krick on October 03, 2005, 05:13:05 pm ---The problem with flash is that it doesn't take well to repeated writings.  Normal digital camera use is fine but a swap file would trash a flash card in short order.

--- End quote ---

then I guess my sandisk cruzer is the exception.  I thrash it pretty hard, even run some simple apps and games off it.


--- End quote ---


Running apps isn't a problem.  However, booting windows off of it would be a problem because of how often the swap file gets written to.  You could, however boot off of a flash drive and have a separate small hard drive solely to hold the swap file and other temp files that are rewritten thousands of times daily.

SirPoonga:
Well, right, but we aren't talking about booting off this thing.  I retract anyway, usb would be slower than this but alot since the original point was speed.

krick:
Even if you used a compact flash card and an ATA adapter, The i-Ram will blow the doors off of it...

http://www.dansdata.com/io043.htm


--- Quote ---And, after paying for Flash memory, you wouldn't get instant startup anyway. CompactFlash cards in ATA mode only support PIO 4, which uses more CPU time than any of the DMA modes that all current ATA hard drives support, and can only shift data at a theoretical maximum of 16.7 megabytes per second, which is rather slower than the sustained read speed of various high density consumer drives these days. The card may also have its own overhead that makes the real transfer rate a lot lower.

A memory card has negligible seek time, which can be very handy for some things and certainly doesn't hurt for system startup. But the low transfer rate will kill the advantage.

And, even if that didn't bother you, you'd still need a hard drive to put your swap file on, because NT-series Windows flavours can't run without swap no matter how much physical RAM they've got. You can't put the swap file on the CompactFlash card, because of the limited write cycles the memory supports. You can, if you want to be devious, put the swap file on a RAM disk, but that doesn't actually improve system performance significantly.

--- End quote ---

rdagger:
Since were talking boot time, the review states that the i-Ram boots Windows XP in 31 seconds compared to 35 seconds with a 10K RPM drive.  For a MAME cabinet, I don't see any benefit when you are just saving 4 seconds.  Especially if there is a power outage for more than 16 hours and you drive goes blank.

JustMichael:
Just use dos...   ;)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

Go to full version