[luau] Disk on Chip

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Sun Mar 30 00:33:00 PST 2003


On Sat, 2003-03-29 at 23:09,
Michael_Bishop/FARRINCS/HIDOE at notes.k12.hi.us wrote:
> Here is an interesting article about ITX mainboards with the capability for
> "Disk on Chip". Seems like you could have a very small computer with
> built-in Linux.
> 
> http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/20030326/index.html

Today you can buy IDE flash disks.  They are tiny devices that plug into
your IDE slot like a IDE cable, and the computer thinks it is a IDE hard
drive.  It should work with ANY computer with an IDE controller.

They are very slow compared to hard drives and you will eventually kill
the disk by writing it too much (millions of times now days?) so they
are not very useful for normal computers, but for smaller embedded
devices like media players or POS (cash registers) they are a pretty
good idea.  Without a spinning hard drive you can increase reliability
because the only moving parts in your computer are the fans.

I originally considered IDE flash disks to boot LTSP thin clients for
our Linux in Schools projects, but even the smallest disks make this far
too expensive when you can easily find quality PXE bootable 10/100 NICs
for around $20-25 each.  IDE flash disks alone are around that price for
small capacities (4MB or 8MB).

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com





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