i was wondering if anyone tried this on an old notebook, and what was the performance gain in battery charge time, boot time and system responsiveness.... not long ago i saw and adapter from SD card to IDE, i lately i was thinking that it might be an interesting way to bring some life back in old portable pcs installed with windows 95/98/2000... or maybe for a linux based solution with a light UI. thanks, karsten. PS if you have links related to this please post them! i don't think i'm the first one thinking about this
Apparently, some people I know have tested using a regular SD card in an IDE adapter (I too was interested in the idea), and there are 2 major issues with it: 1) The system can't boot directly from it; and 2) It's much slower than a real SSD due to various complicated reasons, including slow IDE adapters, slow random access (apparently), etc.
The easy way is, to use a CF card instead of SD, as CF card act as regular HDD, when you use an adapter to ATA.
Even CF to IDE adapters are slower than proper SSD. My advice is: Don't buy cheap ones. There are adapters for $4-5, but don't settle for those, there's a few good for $15-16 at some places. The same goes for CF cards aswell, naturally.
Bear in mind that the drive will have a limited number of writes and with virtual memory that drive will be written to ALOT. Not sure how reliable the drive would be over a long time. But it would be a fun project.
I saw a numberous project and there is no problem with rewrite as CF was designed for profesional photographers to take a lot of pictures. You can even replace your Killer Instinct HDD for CF and it will plays very well.
Yeah but with a Windows OS? I've heard it causes problems, but that there is a version of Linux designed with flash memory in mind and so does not cause the same problems as it does not cache to the drive.
Just read up on removing temp and virtual memory either off or onto a seperate SD or USB stick. The eee sites will tell you as it works similarly
NAND flash all have wear leveling so you COULD reasonably use it for a number of years as a system drive. No it wouldn't be wise to use virtual memory with it, but nowadays it wouldn't be wise to use virtual memory at all if you have 1GB of RAM or more which seemingly most people do. That said flash has great seek times, but mediocre read times and sometimes horrible write times. If you want a solid state drive for performance reasons, go with a nonvolatile RAM based solution (AWESOME) or more realistically a true NAND flash solid state hard drive; hey're pretty cheap nowadays, like $400 for 15gb and have much better read/write performance than flash cards. To be fair, Killer Instinct's (and any other arcade's) HD is more or less a ROM
well if you can get more or less the same with a sd card or cf card (for fast boot it's the seek time that matters most) that goes for 10-20$, i wouldn't call cheap 400$ for the disk you talk about...
Check out these figures: Real solid state HD: read at 100+MiB/s, write at 80+MiB/s The best CF cards: read at 100+MiB/s, write at ~10MiB/s The best SD cards: read at ~30 MiB/s, write at ~5 MiB/s
then the CF cards are perfect. remember that the project is to give life back to old notebooks... with the 400$ for that disk you talked about you can buy a brand new one
I used a 2GB CF with a 2.5" CF/IDE interface in my Toshiba Libretto 70, required a bit of work and using the Lite98, but it works fast, going from 30 to 40 seconds from going past the BIOS screen to the Desktop to about 15 seconds... and I've not had any trouble. As the CF adapter I have used had dual slots, I whacked another 2GB CF in it to hold programs. And as I have the expansion dock, I even have other CF reader cards for other CF cards to hold data. Battery life is improved by about 30 minutes (although the batteries only lasted about 1.5 hours anyway). I used a cheap 2 dual slot CF reader from Hong Kong which cost about $90HKD (about 6 quid) and decent Sandisk Ultra II 2GB CF cards. Unbranded and generic cards aren't recommended as they are slower and I did chuck one as it started to fail to read / write data correctly.
your results are wonderful jamtex! less than 50% boot time and 30 extra mins out of the usual 90... that makes 33% more battery! by the way... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt6VbOY3xE0 PS would you please send me the links were to get those adapters and tell me the size of them? i want to be sure they can fit in my notebook's HD bay
I don't think you should completely turn off virtual memory in Windows. Even our 8Gb W2k3 server has virtual memory on for performance reasons.
...and some programs (by Microsoft mostly) won't load unless some (usually 10MB+) virtual memory is present! ~Krelian
Virtual memory would be NECESSARY if the memory usage reached 8GB, but there is never a situation where virtual memory can offer increased performance, I hope it's obvious why. I've been virtual memory free (except in the MMU sense of course) for maybe 3 years now. Sure some stupid programs bitch because they think you may potentially run out of RAM, but there's usually an ignore button.
there is also the possibility of buying an adaptor which uses two USB ports. That can connect to any harddisk. I have one, and I bought it for 200 kroner. So it isn´t that expensive.
Using a CF > SATA / IDE convertor means that it's internal and it's readable by all operating systems out of the box plus it does take up less power too. Most CF adapters are designed to fit a standard notebook SATA / IDE space, but you may need to tweak it a little to fit caddies used.
