Suspend to Flash??? S3.1?

2k1Toaster · 05-09-2006, 01:02 AM

Hello. This may sound like a stupid question, but howcome nobody has developed a "suspend to flash" kit for computers. (of any kind)

Basically, this is what I thought, could be wrong:
There is hibernation which writes the current status of the system to a harddrive, and cuts off power. Suspend writes the stuff to RAM, and pretty much drops power from everything else.
The problem with hibernation, is that it actually has to boot the drive up again. Problem with standby is the trickling of power.
What about a combination. A flash card, like a MMC card, is where the actual contents of information are stored. They are easily written to and read from. They can definately hold the 300 or so megabytes required. They don't require power to keep their info. Benefit over hard drive is faster access time. This is of course if a MMC to SATA or something was created.
Then when you unsuspend, it would read from flash and while reading it would be spinning up harddrive and other such things. So it would come back faster.
To improve further, you could have something like a 32Kb ROM chip that continues to have power to store the driver for the Flash reader. That way, only 32Kb of data remains powered up compared to 512Mb-4Gb normally.

I dunno, thought I would ask if anyone knew why something like this hasn't been made. Also kinda wanted to see poeples reactions.

Do you think this would be useful. Do you think it would improve restore times, and lower power drain? Any modification of this idea would be great if there is some other input. Maybe motherboards in the future will have super fast flash chips dedicated to hibernation. Who knows????

Redian · 05-09-2006, 01:15 AM

i know you will be able to do it in vista, as well as use a flash drive as ram, the reaosn why you cant do it for xp and such is because it has driver problems apperently (for flash usb drives) and there are no big flash memory banks (for lack of a better word) on computer mobos

Redian · 05-09-2006, 01:18 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Random Website

Sony is interested in this, and has done some work in this area. It would give all the benefits of Suspend to RAM with the added advantage of being able to remove power from external RAM too. A project within Samsung has looked at using NAND Flash as a swap device, to make use of existing Suspend to Disk code.

http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPub...273f0836f3947c

2k1Toaster · 05-09-2006, 01:24 AM

I know, but I was hoping for a Flash Card Reader to be desiged that emulates a bootable drive, and then it would be read from that. I don't know. Seems like a lot of work for little gain, but might be worth it in the future.

<<insert Jetsons music here>>

2k1Toaster · 05-09-2006, 01:25 AM

didn't see that article. Looks promising. Someone beat me to it!

RawsonDR · 05-10-2006, 04:39 AM

What you're suggesting is not fundamentally different than current hibernate. The only difference is where the hibernation data is stored. A flash drive can all ready be mounted as an ATA device, so it's only a software matter of redirecting the storage of the hibernation data. This could have been done all ready, for all I know.

This makes the argument simply, "Lets do hibernation, but make the slow part much faster." Well yeah, that's obvious enough. But the unfortunate truth is that flash memory is not faster than hard drive storage. The fastest flash units compete with the slowest modern 4200rpm laptop drives. Yes, they gain advantage in latency in a limited amount of circumstances due the physics of moving parts in disks, but this is mostly inconsequential. The long "boot" process everyone is annoyed by has nothing to do with the hard drive - a hard drive can go from off to writing in seconds. The boot process is a whole other animal, involving the most basic functions of the motherboard and other attached components. This is where standby gets half it's advantage - no traditional boot required.

So a true "Suspend to Disk" combination of the two methods might involve moving the RAM to disk, but actually suspending the system, as in Standby, instead of shutting it off as in Hibernation. [Note that this would still require constant power draw (though much more inconsequential) as the components are not powered down but instead put to 'sleep'] So why can't we do this? I don't really have an answer. But I would guess that it has to do with the integral nature of the RAM to the CPU and their direct connection, whereas ATA access probably requires more overhead and 'boot' type initialization.

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