The State of Solid State Storage 481
carlmenezes writes "Pretty much every time a faster CPU is released, there are always a few that are marveled by the rate at which CPUs get faster but loathe the sluggish rate that storage evolves. Recognizing the allure of solid state storage, especially to performance-conscious enthusiast users, Gigabyte went about creating the first affordable solid state storage device, and they called it i-RAM. Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?"
Swap Drive (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Not Compatible with Linux (Score:1, Funny)
Thats interesting.. Does the sun also make your skin crawl?
Re:Not Compatible with Linux (Score:3, Funny)
It's called "lazy writes", i.e. the OS waits until all the disk buffers are full, or a time limit expires before it writes a buffer to disk. It's a pretty standard operating system optimization - Windows uses it too. "The whole sync() thing" flushes all the buffers and updates the superblock, telling the OS that the file system is "clean". Windows does this also, this is why you see CHKDSK (the Windows version of fsck) running after a rare Windows system crash.
Re:Let me think. (Score:4, Funny)
on that note, they could use the speed as their sales pitch. "Formats Windows partitions 6 times faster!!!" *ducks*
I know it's just a joke, and I'm going maybe a bit off topic here, but have you ever formatted a Windows partition in Linux? Seriously, this is the way to fly...even if you don't use Linux much, it's worth your time to go download Knoppix or something and learn the few commands used to partition and format. You can format a 300GB drive as either FAT32 or NTFS in less than 10 seconds.
1)fdisk /dev/hda (/dev/hda == primary master...hdb==pri/slave, hdc==sec/mast, etc.) /dev/hda1 -or- mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/hda1 (choose the partition number you created in step #1.)
2)Use self-explanitory one-letter commands to navigate fdisk and create either an NTFS (type 7) or FAT32 (type b) partition.
3)mkntfs -Q
There are two great parts about this. First is the speed....It takes several hours to do this in Windows, but this takes seconds and works great with Windows afterward. But just as nice is the ability to create really big FAT32 drives. The format allows for huge (16TB or something?) volumes, but for some stupid reason the format utility provided in Windows restricts you to 32GB.
That brings up an incredibly frustrating story, about the last time I tried to format a drive in Windows. It was a USB drive, so I wanted to use FAT for portability. I tried to format it, and in about 5 seconds the program told me the size of the drive and had me hit enter to confirm that I wanted it all as one big FAT32 volume. Then it verified the drive integrity for 7 and a half hours at the end of which it said "Volume is too large for FAT32."
YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! YOU KNEW HOW BIG IT WAS WHEN YOU FUCKING STARTED!!!!
Anyway, that's how I came to realize how much better it is to use Linux to format all your Windows drives. I won't be going back until MS forces a new filesystem on us.
Re:Let me think. (Score:2, Funny)
Well, you gotta understand, the partition probably looked smaller from the outside. Think about it... the formatter had just been vacuuming for seven and a half hours... no wonder it thought the partition was too big!
Re:Disk evolution (Score:3, Funny)
Or 560,000x if calculated on a PowerPC with AccurateIntegerMath (tm) technology.