Just throwing this out for comments - with the price of flash memory being really cheap, why hasn't any mobo manufacturers put enough on their board to accommodate the OS? It would seem to me to be a no brainer, much more secure and less likely to be compromised by virii and malware, at least for a while, updates would be similar to flashing any other firmware - the benefits seem to me to be great - especially an almost instantaneous boot time. Just wondering outloud.

SiGiNT

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869

They have thought about it in the past - though I seem to remember it not being as far back as that article would suggest considering it was written in 2007. But time flies when you are having fun

They are available to buy though (found one here
http://www.pickfromtaiwan.co.uk/asus-p5e3-deluxe-wifi-ap-motherboard-lga775-2xpci-ex16-6xsata-ii-163-p.asp).
Not cheap though - and neither is it a complete OS. But it is a start.

bb

My point is it should be cheap, I bought a Lexar 8 GB thumbdrive a year ago for just $14.00.

SiGiNT

I've seen thoes asus mbz
I'm think this is only good for recovery & tasks like that.
but the price for a really fast 8GB flash memory is almost equal to a 500GB HDD , and i'm sure still flash cannot be as fast as HDD

Huh??????

Flash is only limited by the bus width - your typical USB thumb drive seems slow because its essentially a serial device, when USB 3.0 becomes established you will see a ten fold increase in speed, (yes 10X), it's also limited by the fact it's FAT based with all of the associated problems - try copying a 4+ GB file to a thumbdrive - it won't do it - flash is essentially the same as the memory on your mobo only non volatile the put it on an LVDS bus and it's lightyears faster than your hardrive, access time in micro rather than milliseconds - essentially you're saying that your BIOS is a bottleneck - I' don't think so. but maybe it's not quite cheap enough yet - just deleted the old.windows directory in my Win 7 laptop - almost 40 GB (Ahhh got to love Vista).

SiGiNT (Gramps#2)

You can have your motherboard cheap, fast or good. Pick two

I understand your point though - my post was only to indicate such hardware was available. I can but assume in the two years that it has been out - there was not enough demand to ramp up production to get reductions in cost through economies of scale, nor enough interest mooted at the time about a cheaper, entry level device to warrant further investigation.

Though that was then, now prices have fallen enough to make it possible at a much more attractive price point so who knows?

Happy holidays
bb

i'm sorry for the lack of my knowledge.
But i was talking about usb flash. But why some flashes are so much faster than others on the same usb bus ?
I know that memory is so much faster than hdd

There is a tool ( HPUSBF.exe & HPUSBFW.exe ) which can format the usb flash as NTFS and when i format my old slow flash as ntfs , it performs so much faster on large files.

As to the slowness of usb drives, I dunno, I have 3 machines wth usb 2 and the same thumb works at different rates on all 3 - same thing, kinda, why are internet downloads faster on Vista than XP and even faster on Win 7 - gotta be somewhere in those silly 1's and 0's

SiGiNT

Flash memory come in many different varieties, out of which some are very fast, and some are definitely not nearly as fast as a good harddisk (seek-time/latency - more likely to be better, transfer speed, not likely to be better).

That's why the speed (and cost) is so different between different USB sticks, even though they are using the same bus type.

Also, regarding some other statements above, USB sticks can be formatted with NTFS without any tools:

http://www.ntfs.com/quest22.htm

It might be fast(er) for big files, but for small files I have noticed it can be unbearably slow instead, due to the more complex file system data structures being kept for all files. Also see the other stability warnings on that page.

Try to buy 64 GB, it would not cost $14.00*8 but much more... It's cheaper to buy eight 8 GB instead of one 64 GB...Think about it, its a problem...

It seems to me that I have seen 64 GB thumb drives for less than $100.00, too expensive for my tastes, dELTA, the problem is that flash is usually single pair serial, all I'm saying is that if flash would be configured as an extended pci device the scale of speed improvement would be tremendous as you would then be using either 4, 8, even 32 pair LVDS - a couple years ago prior to extended pci, it would not have been be as attractive or efficient.

SiGiNT