David, flash drives are becoming a very viable medium for computers. Dell recently announced that certain models of laptops would have the option for a flash hard drive, but at a steep cost. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/26/2049235
I predict that within 5 years, you'll find lots of computers having a solid state drive. Lots of people are using usb flash drives as a part of their OS today, moving their swap files over to flash for speed: http://lifehacker.com/software/vista/speed-up-windows-vista-with-a-flash-drive-221592.php http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/04/24/living-dangerously-moving-your-macs-swap-files-to-a-usb-flash-drive Windows XP won't support this without quite a bit of hacking, but it can be done. It's not for the faint of heart though. One thing to note, moving your swap file over will work, but with cheap USB Flash drives, it will actually slow you down, make sure you use a quality flash drive that is built for performance. Charles On 5/2/07, David Locklear <dlocklea...@gmail.com> wrote:
A few weeks ago, I posted an idea about putting a USB stick on the inside of your computer. This idea met with little fanfare. Asus, a motherboard company, has decided to take my idea one step farther. They took the plastic shell off the USB stick and then soldered the flash-memory card to one of their newest Vista-ready motherboards. http://techreport.com/reviews/2007q1/asus-vistaedition/phison.jpg Of course, there are obvious disadvantages to this, like what if you get bad memory or your memory later fries. Or you decide you like it, but want more flash-memory. But with 512 Mb, you could "temporarily store" your current work projects, especially Word and Excel files. I think the main reason they are doing this is that they claim it "might" speed up the time that your Vista computer boots. But if you already have fast RAM, this new Vista feature, will not be improved by the flash-memory. Ten years ago, I worked for an engineering research company on a AutoCAD station. The computer had a huge 600 Mb hard-drive. My point is that you can probably find a practical use for a 512 Mb flash-memory on your motherboard. My prediction is that in another 10 years, computers will have a mother-board slot for internal flash-memory. It "might" use something similar to Firewire 800, and we will be talking about gigabytes. For example, Lexar, already has a Firewire 800 CF Card reader for their fastest 8 Gb cards: http://www.lexar.com/readers/pro_udma_reader.html In summary, now would be a good time to invest some money in a start-up company making flash memory. David Locklear
