Theoretical SATA Flash Drive Question

[Clunk]

I've seen a few SATA flash drive housings, and lets say that we had the absolute fastest (whatever that may be) flash card hooked up to this SATA reader, with XP or Vista installed on it, does anyone know how this would perform against a standard decent 7200rpm hard drive or even a raptor?

Would it even allow the o/s to be installed on it?

Thanks

[IAmATeaf]

The fastest flash card that I've seen is around 25mb/sec, that's the read speed with write speeds being around 5mb lower.

[Funkstar]

Access times are really low though aren't they?

I'd be interested to see how this would compair to the SSDs that are being released over the next few months.

It would be interesting to try this out in my HTPC

[jimbouk]

I've got a 1GB 133x CF card, and just waiting for a IDE->CF adapter to arrive. Plan is to run the swap file from there. With IDE the CF cards are transparent to the OS (just appear as a normal hdd), not sure about SATA ones. Hopefully I'll have the advantage of 'ReadyBoost' without the crap from Vista (on XP Pro).

[Funkstar]

not sure about running a swap on them. you might hit the write cycle limit, which will give data corruption.

EDIT: Sandisk Extreme IV cards would be interesting to use. Apparently they go "up to 40MB/sec* sequential read and write speed". Would two of these in RAID-0 improve throughput?

I've never looked at RAID-0 or 1 before, only RAID-5. I can't remember which one give better read and write performance.

EDIT 2: http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/defa...o=SEARCH&comp= prices for Extreme III and IV cards.

[jimbouk]

I've got a 10 year warrenty to play with, and the swap file is hardly vital so it's all good And if you are going diskless then you'll need to put a swap file (win) / partition (lin) somewhere on flash.

Raid-0's the quick one, but I guess with flash you're never going to be reading or writing that large files in one go as the cards can only be so big. Google the Samsung Q30 and Q1 SSD to have a look at real world performance

[Funkstar]

Did some looking around and have an idea of what i'd like to do. Currently have 1gig RAM in my HTPC, but if i take that up to 4gig had dedicate half that for a RAM drive and put the swap on there, that should give a significant speed boost. Pretty sure MediaPortal would appreciate it

After that I could play around with a couple of Extreme IV cards to see how they perform in RAID-0. If they don't work out i can always use them in my Canon 350D

EDIT: just realised i'm kind of hyjacked your thread Clunk, sorry about that

Those CF to SATA converters are basically just a PATA to SATA converter with a CF holder on board. CompactFlash is great because it is just a standard ATA device, hence why you can plug it into a PCCard/CardBus or regular IDE connector with only a physical adapter. The advantage of this SATA converter though is that you won't get any DMA issues. I know when i insert any CF cards in my laptops PCcard slot everything slows down as it stays in PIO mode. I actually don't think this is an issue with SATA at all, although someone else might be better to confirm it.

Connecting all this up, Windows and the BIOS will see it as any other drive. so there will be no problem installing an OS on it or using it as you would any other fixed drive. And depending on the SATA controler, you will probably find it will appear in under the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon.