[Tfug] battery life, power management and windows vs linux

[Jeremy D Rogers]

> > What about the max write limit on flash memory?  I would think that'd
> > get eaten up in a hurry for swap if it's constantly being written to.
> >
> > Ben
> >
>
>
> they were talking about that too.  They mentioned that there were
> "industrial strength" drives that had both the speed and life to support the
> thing.  I don't remember all of what they were saying
>
> Steve.Alley at microsoft.com
> Harold.Wong at microsoft.com
>
> they mentioned kingston usb sticks.... who knows, they might last 1 week
> longer before they burn out??
>
> But then the paging that goes on doesn't need the disk to spin up when it
> needs paging, it's also not on the same spindle as the drive so data access
> and page access don't interfere with each other...

I think ultimately, it all comes down to performance/cost.. Ram is
really really fast, but kinda pricy, and volotile. Harddrive is uber
cheep, but power hungry and loud. Flash wins over ram in being
non-volotile, so you could hibernate to it, for example. Flash also
*might* be less power hungry than a harddrive, is definately quieter
than hd, and it certainly is cheaper than ram. However, it won't be as
fast as ram, and won't be as cheap as harddrive. If you can accept
that the read/write limit might render the flash useless after some
arbitrary length of time, that might be acceptable for the cost. Then
there might be an application where it really would fit the bill.

I can imagine a scenario where you want to have a really quiet system
(maybe a mythtv entertainment system where you don't want the fans and
harddrives causing ambient noise) or want to save power on a mobile
device. Then you could setup nightly or weekly backups to a harddrive,
but actually run the OS and swap off the Flash, and still have a good
chunk of ram for fast access. Then, when the flash wears out after a
year or so (I'm totally guessing here) you buy a new flash drive with
4 times the capacity for 1/4 the price.

Cheers,
JDR