OT Flash-based USB stick with a capacity of 8 GB

Interesting: http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/12/30/pretec_8gb_usb_stick/

I wonder if XP, Excel, and SolidWorks would fit on one?

Best Regards,
Devon T. Sowell
www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

 

Devon,

This isn't as off topic as you might think. Have you ever used a memory
stick for SW files? I have found the following to be true:

1. Latency seems a tad bit higher than a hard drive. Can't explain
that.
2. They get nice and warm. Like every other bit of hardware in you
system, it can be stress tested by running SW related activities.

I think to run SW on a USB stick you would have to create an image of
your system disk and load it into a ram disk to run. Otherwise how are
you going to deal with the registry entries these programs need to run?

 

I'm no expert on this subject.

I have used memory sticks for small assemblies and drawings, so I haven't
really noticed a latency problem. The heat gain is noticeable.

I seem to recall that XP Pro takes approx. 4GB, all the files in my desktop
folder Program Files are 7.2GB. I think it would be interesting to see if
the entire OS, Excel, and SolidWorks could be loaded. Then, I guess, trying
to get the Host to Boot off this drive would be the next requirement. Taking
this further, one could have a portable "computer" for $560.00(price of the
USB stick in the article) plus software on a USB stick?

Devon

 

Devon,

As well as the issues Paul pointed out, there's also the issue of
reliability.

Flash based devices aren't a very good choice where alot of interactive
reading, writing, and overwriting, is involved. This is because flash memory
has a finite limit to how many times it can be written to. In a dynamic
environment, like an OS or an application like SW, areas of memory are
constantly being changed, updated, etc. This could wear out a flash module
rather quickly. The last time I checked, the individual transistor elements
were limited to about 400K read write cycles. This sounds like a lot, and it
is when dealing with file storage. But an OS or application would go through
that number pretty fast.

Rrgards

Mark

 

Interesting. I didn't know that.

Thanks,
Devon