Odd idea in windows Vista

[Cefiar]

On Wednesday 15 February 2006 11:50, Senectus . wrote:
> http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/14/windows_vista_flash_booster_tech/
>
> How is this going to be usable?
>
> From memory the top speed of USB is slower than SATA,

USB's seek speed is much faster. If the files you're hitting are all small, 
you'll gain on the seek speed.

> but more importantly, FLASH memory devices have a write limit (of about 1000
> writes) .. wouldn't using a USB memory key as an extended memory slot
> wipe out the key after a few days of use?

Depends entirely on the flash device. Many flash devices (eg: USB keys) have 
100,000 or 1,000,000 writes before failure, and even that isn't a guaranteed 
failure. It may still work after that, it may not.

I think the idea is to use the USB key for the kernel and startup image files, 
which don't change that regularly. It'll speed up the machine at boot, but I 
have no idea how well it'd work for other types of files or during runtime, 
except possibly for commonly accessed files (eg: system DLL's).

Note that with a bit of work, it'd be dead easy to copy things 
like /boot, /lib and /bin (which all change very little, and on my system 
with 4 kernels currently installed is about 310 meg combined) or possibly 
just /usr/lib (about 1.2 gig on my machine) to a usb key.

The real issues with doing something like this are:
 1. Making sure you either can use the machine without the USB key (if 
necessary?), or recover in some graceful manner if it's not there/damaged.
 2. Making sure you get the right USB key and not some other device.
 3. Hiding the USB key from the normal USB key handlers (otherwise things 
could go haywire).
 4. Making sure that you sync the data to the key after an upgrade, but before 
rebooting. Just because your copy has finished, doesn't mean the data is 
there yet, and rebooting before the copy is finished will leave incomplete 
files.

Nothing insurmountable, just stuff that would need to be done.

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net