Instant On

[Blessedman]

Have been reading about a bit and seen everyone talking about lowing their boot times. Back in the old dayz with the amiga(hehe) we used to have to replace our roms to upgrade our operating system, but in exchange we had almost instant on status(minus GUI). With all the flash disk getting larger and larger why doesn't someone come out with a mobo that allows you to load the OS onto a large Flash Disk that would almost be instant on but would take less than 10 secs to load everything up. Either Flash Disk or a sh*t load of nonvoltile high speed ram. Just another thought.
Peace Guys
Blessedman

 

[somerandomguy]

Exactly what is a flash disk? I mean, I know it's high speed volatile memory, but how does it work (just the basics will do thanks ?

"Ignorance is bliss, but I tend to get screwed over."

 

[Guest]

I think you can buy flash disks that work like harddisks. If you're willing to pay for it, I dont think there is anything that will keep you from building a machine with it.

A cheaper solution would be ACPI suspend to ram. If you can get it to work, windows "boots" in about 10-15 seconds on my rig.

A last way to increase bootup times, is getting a RAID 0 stripe set. Though nowhere as fast as flash memory, it really helps.

---- Owner of the only Dell computer with a AMD chip

 

[HolyGrenade]

They're working on something called mram now. Find out info on it in <A HREF="http://www.techextreme.com/display.asp?ID=312&Page=1" target="_new">techextreme</A>.

It probably can be used as a permanent replacement for harddisks. But I think it would be more suited to another role, like storing only the boot sequence and memory cacheing. And perhaps for storing hybernation mode data and dumping entire memory structures in it, so you can switch your computer off without saving anything and switch on later and carry on working on the same stuff.


<font color=red>"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair!"</font color=red>

 

[Guest]

I don't think that the hard disk speed is the biggest bottleneck. With <A HREF="http://www.netraverse.com" target="_new">win4lin</A> I can go from wanting a windows desktop, to having one in about 5 seconds. A lot of the boot time is likely spent initializing/detecting all your hardware.

Then again, you could just use an OS that you never have to reboot

<i>Cognite Tute</i>
(Think for Yourself)

 

[Blessedman]

I have a ATA/100 RAID 0 Stripping and it decreased my boot time by about 20 secs. I now can boot right around 25-45 secs depending upon windows setup stuff. My mobo also supports Suspend to Ram, but I have yet to get it to work... lol
Peace guys.
Blessedman