On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 01:03:28AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 23:13 +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
This is part of the new Vista technology (called readydrive I believe?)
Pah why does this have to be a "Vista" technology, it should be done at a hardware level dammit. I guess they want the OS to decide what bits are worth marking as being better on the flash (Like the hibernate image) But then even that is flawed because if you extend your system memory over the size of the flash you are stuffed surely. Lets face it given Vista's minimum and recommended requirements nobody is going to be using this with 256MB RAM.
It will be part of ATA8 specs too I believe. Just that Microsoft are leading the way. I'd guess that the disk just looks the same as any other disk to the controller but when combined with magic drivers it will be more "clever". I don't see that just because your system image is more than 256 megs it won't fit on the flash as being sufficiently flawed, as first off you can compress the image onto the flash and if it's enough to get your kernel and drivers on there it will make the system restore fast enough that all the other applications will just be sitting in what will be effectively swap on the main disk (if you engineer this in a sufficiently clever way the restore image on the disk will be exactly swap so you don't actually have to do anything to read from it). When you select your first application it will get swapped back in which will still be faster than loading _everything_ from the disk.
You also have to consider that even when you've just recovered from a hibernate state one thing that takes the most time is the machine reconnecting to networks and working out where it is and spending a few seconds working out where it's going. Of course, if the technology works then I can see drives with at least 1 or 2 gigs of flash appearing very soon.
Thanks Adam