Mister Six

Actually, they are both bad!

One thing I kind of glossed over in all of this is that what you are trying to do is to avoid excessive writes to the flash hard drive, while the Windows swap file is certainly a big offender for this, it is not the only one....

Most programs open some type of temporary files, or write to the registry.
This could be a big problem with the flash drive.

I suggest you use tools (like filemon and regmon at www.sysinternals.com) to check out whatever applications you are planning on running. Remember reading is fine from a flash hard drive, but writing is bad!! (Gross over generalization, but you get the idea).

Chris

Marsupial

Yes, but I do not want to rely on a frozen hard drive to get my carputer running in the morning. This winter, we had -25 celsius on a regular basis, before windchill. (-40 is not very warm for mecanical, but OK for electronics that does not move)
I need devices with no mecanical parts.

As far as I understood, the flash IDE drives are not as bad as the CF cards.

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Mister Six

if by "bad" you mean how many write cycles they can perform before they stop working... then there is no difference.

All of these devices CF / Flash Hard drive / Pen disks / etc. all use the same flash memory chips inside from the same group of manufacturers. Generally flash is rated for 100,000 write cycles, however it is not uncommon for them to far exceed that!

I remember one device that I created that I was accidentally writing to the flash on a continual basis, the flash lasted about 6 seconds! Oops!

Chris

GRUNT

How do "DiskOnChip 2000" Drives, compare to Flash media?

Was thinking of using one on my SBC system I'm planning, and my epia 800 has the
socket for one.

I know there not cheep, but do they suffer from the writing problem?

Mister Six

Yes they do... as do all flash memory based devices...
BTW M-systems (the makers of DiskOnChip) own the patents on the pen disk design, they are like the origianl founders of alot of flash applications.

And the last time I priced those (about a year ago) they where massively expensive, and small in capacity. It was really too small for anything but a DOS or Windows CE boot system, maybe they have come out with bigger ones lately, but I bet they are still very expensive. They are cute tho...

eCar™

Instead of flash memory, wouldn't it be possible to use volatile RAM and a battery?

CdRsKuLL

if your looking at fast boot times, then look down the road of hibernation.. your looking at bootup time of less than 10 sec's in most cases.. also remember to remove all the auto settings in then bios for your drives set em manual.. this say you will save alittle more time.

NJay

I am playing around with the Eval version of windows Embedded studio to see If I can reduce the boot up time. At present I have a 117mb footprint that boots to the windows XP shell and has NO swap drive at all hence would be suitable for Flash drive (I aready have the ide flash adaptor so not far off)

What I would say though is from experience XPe is not that much quicker to boot than regular XP as it only really a component version of it. Even with stripping out things I didn't need for the 1st attempt (COM1, LPT, IE, DirectX, LAN) it still take 45seconds on a Eden800 to boot from cold.

I presume these devices that use Windows Embedded don't really turn off when you hit the power button and are in effect doing a STR ???

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Mister Six

Sure would, the correct name for this is non-volatile RAM. a couple of years ago there was a clever little design that took old 72pin RAM and generated a clock...

(ehhh... ok a little explanation is in order here, what you call RAM is actually "Dynamic RAM", which requires a constant clock being supplied to it or it loses it's memory, the opposite to this is "Static RAM" which doesn’t require a clock, and hence is good for battery backed use, but it has its down sides as well)

And then put the whole thing behind an IDE controller... *poof* instant cheap non-volatile battery backed up storage! I think they went out of business!

I haven’t seen anything like this is the last few years, great idea tho...

Mister Six

Yes, although I hate hibernation as it seems to always be a problem.
And your quite correct about the correct hard drive setting for the BIOS setup, don’t leave anything set to automatic, as that eats tons of time at boot up.

The one exception to this is in the case of a removable hard drive, in which case you do want to leave it set to automatic (‘cuz it might not always be there, or may change size, type, etc)

Mister Six

Nice.... you must of stripped alot out to get it that small, is network support still left in?

Which one??

That can't be true, 'cuz that would mean Microsoft lied to us, and we know that doesn't happen Have you tried BOOTVIS yet? Could be a third party device driver slowing you down. The "party line" from the good folks at M$ is that a "minimally configured" system can boot in 17 seconds, I have not seen this actually happen, and my experiences sound similar to yours... Actually my favorite embedded version of Windows is not Win NTe or Win XPe, but Win 2000! (Yeah I know it is not componentized). I can strip out all but 8 processes running and give an 850Mhz P3 the "feel" of a 2Ghz P4! And still have networking, plug-n-pray, graphics, etc). BTW that 45 second boot time is the same for my stripped Win2k.

Lost you on STR? STR to me means a string?
But if I get your question correctly, the power status of embedded devices can be alot different than a standard PC with ATX psu, like holding up power, etc. Naturally this is not "doable" in a car! (Ignoring tank circuits, UPS, etc)

Marsupial

Njay this is interesting.

any documentation?

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