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

[TR]

On 3/24/07, Jeremy D Rogers <jdrogers at optics.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
> > > 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>