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Multi Distro LiveCD and Flash Hard Disk

Discussion and questions about hardware for LiveCDs, LiveDVDs, and LiveUSB devices, such as media, optical drives, and USB flash drives.

Multi Distro LiveCD and Flash Hard Disk

Postby anony » Thu Jun 30, 2005 11:06 am

Hi
Recently Samsung announced new 10 GB hard disk based on fast Flash Storage / RAM.

Unfortunately there is a limit on FLASH write cycle (hundred thousands times). After this cycle is reached, the disk is no longer writable.

However there is NO LIMIT on read cycle and the disk can be read unlimited times without destroying it.

I have idea about combination of Multi Distro LiveCD, Flash based hard disk and the REAL hard disk with magnetic disk.

The system can be booted using the multi distro LiveCDs stored in the flash hard disk, but application's data, temporary files, cache can be written into the Real hard disk.

Is this idea possible?
What about the performance of the system compared with ordinary PC?

Thank you.
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Postby nick » Thu Jun 30, 2005 3:13 pm

That seems like a great idea, I would think system performace would increase in several areas, depending on the performance of the flash drive. Access time and read speed I would expect to increase, but write speeds would probably be the same. Other advantages, besides speed, would be reliability, a quieter computer, and less power use (laptops!). The hard drive could be kept sleeping while not being written to. All this in a system that looks and acts identical to a normal Linux install. It can even look like a single partition system.

I can see booting from a LiveCD on a computer with two drives, the flash drive and the standard hard drive. The LiveCD would include a script that would copy itself, possibly decompressed, onto the flash drive, and change some basic settings. These settings could include where the spinning disk is located, the root password, etc. It could then reboot, and the next boot would bring up the system in read-only mode from the flash drive, and use UnionFS to save all the changes to the disk.
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Postby rex » Fri Jul 29, 2005 9:47 pm

some firewall live cd like redwall already did this.
it boots up and run everything from cd, but it can use hdd for squid cache and other things.
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