Submitted by Vista’s External Memory Device technology will boost demand for Flash first. It allows the system to grab USB-connected storage as system memory, using the addition capacity as a half-way house between a true RAM disk and the hard drive. Vista copies over apps and data it anticipates the user will want, allowing them to be subsequently read into RAM far more quickly than they would from the hard drive.
Would anybody actually use this feature. Aren’t flash drives to store non-volatile information. Why not just buy another stick of ram. This wouldn’t work instead of ram since theft would be far too easy. Just a geewizz feature that is pretty much useless.
I guarantee you some people will find a use for it. Just because you can’t, doesn’t mean it’s useless.
Since the NAND flash is faster than the harddrive and slower than system RAM, it only really makes sense to use this feature on machines that does not have enough memory. It could be useful on laptops and on on other portable devices, where its very costly to upgrade the amount of memory. At least when we are taliking general perfomance.
Storing system files on the flash device naturally allows you to boot faster. But using a 1GB flash device for faster booting is a little overkill in my opinion.
So for most stationary PCs it would not make too much sense, say for some older PCs who are just about adequately spec´d to run Vista.
I have serious doubts however, that this will really boost the sales of NAND flash as much as the MP3 player sales. Seems a bit like wishful thinking to me.
Edited 2006-02-14 18:13
It’s a horrible idea. Flash can be read lot’s of times, but writing to flash gives you a limited life span.
Now something I have been thinking about is putting the core OS(kernel, drivers) on basically a read only mounted system on a flash disk. This would be great for speeding up boot times, and overall system security as updates. Linux/BSD/OS X can do this now with relative ease, Windows I don’t know enough about the internals but it should be able to as well. I wouldn’t put apps in there though. IE/Firefox don’t belong on a drive like that. That would be a simple way to increase security. Like using a Knoppix live cd. if you do get infected a reboot restores most of your system so you can update everything securely.
It’s not a terrible idea, it could easily improve the speed of booting. But, it’s not a new idea, a unique idea or an especially inventive idea.
You’re right about it not being a new idea.
It’s basically the Flash equivalent of IBM’s PS/1 “Rapid Resume” feature from 1992. My PC would boot in 5-10 seconds, along with every windows-related glitch and memory leak it had stored from the last shutdown.
There are some important things achieved from a reboot… especially when running MS Windows (XP included). I don’t see that fact disappearing anytime soon even with Vista on the horizon.
I think it makes SOME sense, because you need to reboot Windows so much. I think they are trying to minimize time wasted during re-boots.
No way. The last thing you want to do is save the state of the last boot after a crash. And as mentioned, flash has a limited number of writes. Flash memory is a bad bad place to have as a non-volatile cache. Flash is also much much slower than even the slower ram.
As someone else pointed out this would be most useful for old systems that don’t have much ram. These same old systems would be bad candidates for windows vista at all.
So if someone could find a legitamte real life use for this ‘gosh lookee here’ technology, let’s hear it!
Uhhhhh, dudes … this is intended primarily for notebook users, which are hibernated and awakened all the time. This will definitely help with boot times.
Translation: we still haven’t solved the problem of not getting your desktop usable the moment it appears.
All this is doing is shaving some time off the precaching XP and OS X already use, without addressing the underlying problem with XP’s implementation of it.
Reread Thom’s summary. What isn’t being advertised is a Flash startup cache (i.e. instant startup) but merely an improvement to application/data precaching. What’s missing from the article is an explanation of the actual lives of that Flash memory and what happens when it dies.
According to the article the idea’s imitating CPU caching. It remains to be seen whether this adds a real boost to performance and moreover what happens when malware or bugs corrupt the cache.
What underlying problem?
In some cases, it’ll be cheaper, and in most cases more convienient that a stick of RAM. It’s really not aimed at replacing RAM upgrades anyway, but is aimmed at decreasing latency when data must be moved in and out of RAM.
RE: Theft
Do you mean theft of data or theft of the devices. If it’s devices, the solution is simple — unplug the devices and take them with you when you’re done using the computer if you’re in a public setting. If you mean data theft, the data is encrypted before being transferred to the device.
Edited 2006-02-14 18:07
I think there’s a cheaper/faster volatile kind of solid state memory.
Hopefully it won’t decide to do this unilaterally and zap the data I had on that USB device. 🙂
I remember talks years ago about putting some kind of non-volatile solid-state memory on hard drives in order to keep a cache of commonly-accessed things.
The description of “system memory” is somewhat incorrect, as it doesn’t actually add any more available memory to your system — it just acts as a persistant cache for commonly-accessed files and applications. I imagine that this is to alleviate the performance penalty of seeking around for hundreds of small files. Flash memory can do random accesses much faster than a regular hard drive, but when it comes to sequential transfers, hard drives are still king.
It existed years ago.
When I was an ASIC engr at Quantum in late 90’s, the Solid State ver of our SCSI drives used bat backed DRAM and a special controller.
It was a very niche market for large servers so sales volumes were never high and ultimately we dropped out of the market.
The HDD business has the lowest margins relative to the technology even in the best of times.
Such HDDs probably won’t happen again unless it can be highly commoditized and alas that takes the like of MS to drive the market.
Isn’t number of write cycles to the flash eeprom memory limited (10000000 writes per sector os so) ?
I have a couple of 256megs USB keys currently being unused. I have a feeling I will run outta USB ports in the near future. lol
I have had a bootable USB memory stick with a ~50MB Linux emergency setup (R.I.P. is superb) for a couple of years now. And it wasn’t my idea, either.
I’m glad to see that Microsoft is catching up to the early years of the century at least.
And will it use your flash drive as system memory?
Just create an empty file on the device and do a “swapon filename” and it will use it as memory.
Duh.
internet explore,outlook (express), msn messanger, microsoft office ?
Gee. That might be theonly means they have left to get people to actually use IE.
I can just see it now, people running out to buy a 2gb flash stick and load Quake 4 into it(plus few mods).
Honestly tho, I would rather see SATA-based FDD’s come out so I can load it up with the OS/Distro of my choice plus key apps for it(Productivity, Communications, and basic Multimedia apps), and just buy a ultraquiet 250gb drive for storage and games. When that happens, we’ll see a whole new set of distros specializing in that environment. Imagine Gnome loading in less than 10 seconds.
It would be used as a cache for very rarely changing data, such as fonts, executables and DLLs. Most of the C:Windows directory could be copied there, along with most of the C:Program Files, because they hardly ever change. It’s a good idea. I’ve been recently seeing 1GB flash drives for around $40. Many people would definitely buy a few gigs to put their frequently used applications on it, if it means faster boot/launch times. The only times it would be written is when you install a new application, which happens less than million times a year, so the memory stick won’t go wrong, I guarantee that. It’s not a cache for frequently chaning data, you can bet on it.
This feature will probably shine if non-continuous reads from hard drives… As HDs have VERY different read times depending how the data is storage, and how close the data is… Flash Memory doesn’t have this problem.
MS and Seagate (IIRC) was working in some hybrid HDs with build-in flash memory for performance proposes. This feature’s probably related to this technology too.
As I read some of the posts on this forum in general it’s really hard to post back properly because there are so many ignorant linux hacks around that know nothing about any new technology put out by Microsoft.
Basically, any technology that is put out by Microsoft is totally useless and buggy and anything they do smells like roses.
That’s exactly why when I post, it makes it look like a trolling post as their are so many people that are anti-microsoft just because they can’t have a properly formed opinion from their anti-microsoft friends. It’s kind of like a form of brainwashing.
I am not saying Microsoft is great or that they are the best, I am just saying use your own head and think with your own brain and not from some liberal, anti-establishment, and hippy point of view.
Just because other kids are ignorant doesn’t mean you have to be the same way.
Edited 2006-02-15 02:03
echo $TITLE | sed ‘s/boot/root/’ 🙂
wow I can save valuable 30 seconds of my life, give in to impulsive, impatitent cravings and install vista (a snapshot of my future thought train if this superduperniftyomgicreamedmypants feature gets incorporated into vista). Infact to make very good use of this superduperniftyomgicreamedmypants feature I will reboot my pc every 5 minutes. This will make me so happy, I will be able to see my pc boot as faster than it takes NASA space shuttles to malfunction (thats freaking fast).
on a sidenote, I do not reboot my machine for weeks, even months. This feature is trivial to me and to anyone who knows what patience means.
This feature doesn’t have anything to do with booting. Its more like a swap file on a RAM disk.
It also doesn’t occur, at least in the BETA, automatically, you need to specifiy the device is used as memory in the device properties. You can also specify the amount of space put aside for this use.