Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Thermodyne, I totally owe you a burrito now. I wonder if its possible to find RAM disks these days, since normal HDs are so cheap. I would like to find a RAM disk that uses SATA, that would be sweet. I'm sure if I was an electronics whiz, I get a controller and rig it up.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Ram disks are portions of your RAM that are set aside as virtual HDD space. what you are describing sounds like a FLASH disk, which would be non-volotile and orders of magnitude slower.

RAM disks are more or less obsolete due to modern memory management practices. it used to be that you could make things run uber-fast by putting the program on a RAM disk instead of your hard drive, and taking advantage of the higher speed of the memory and of the faster bus that the SIMM / DIMM banks were on.

These days, computers have such stupidly large quantities of memory, and OS memory management routines are so advanced, you will generally be slowing yourself down by second-guessing your system and trying to force software to run on a ram disk.

There are, however, solid state FLASH based hard disks with no moving parts in them. these are crazy fast, and models exist for both SCSI-3, Fibrechannel, and IDE. now if you just had a massive SAN filled with them...

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Flash is not the same thing. It works the same but is built on a newer technology. The first ram drives actually had sticks of sdram ram, and 1/2 a gig was huge. today they use ddram and go up into the tarabite range.

The little drives I have predate flash, sodimm I would think based on age and IDE 33 standards marked on them.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

so what your talking about is volitile storage? it could be fast, but the overhead required to populate it would be anoying.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Yep, every time you power down it needs to be reloaded. But ghost casting makes it quick.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Maybe the next gen of OS will see a return to having the the OS on ROM. I always thought that made a big difference in speed. And now days the technology is getting to where having several Gig of ROM is very doable.

The biggest benefit would be that the systems themselves would need to be designed with some sort of conformity. That would in return stabalize the PC market that is just progressing too fast for the general public. (Why do you think consoles are popular? two reasons, Price and the fact they they remain a stable platform for several years instead of becomming obsolete as soo as you make the purchase.

Oh well, my vote is to go the OS on ROM rute.

Nuf said, Cheers!

P.S. But what does all this have to do with the SE5 beta? Nothing So might I suggest we start a new thread about "The future of PC's and Super Rigs."

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

maybe not ROM, but repackaging an OS as some sort of flashable bios extension might be nice (you need to be able to easily patch it)... what about a name like aios (advanced i/o system), or maybe aiospabocus for win-like OSes (advanced i/o system, plus a bunch of completely useless stuff). http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Uhm... I like "aiospabocus" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Cmon DEG, we are talking about here, Im surprised we kept it on-topic as long as we did http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Actually, this discussion could be loosly related to the se5 beta, we are discussing sys specs after all, my bad, sorry.

..Speaking of sys specs, I just bought myself a new comfy high-back chair for my computer station. Now I'll be really comfortable for the beta and beyond!!

Cheers! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Hmmm........does it have a cup holder? Or do you use the CD reader for that http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif