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

[Ronald Sutherland]

Jeremy D Rogers 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
>
>   
I work with a product that has an FeRAM chip in it, its as fast as SRAM 
(I think?) and holds like FLASH without the write cycle limits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeRAM  (warning: I did not read this and 
hope I'm not full of crap)
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