interesting article - CF ATA RAID

[eagl]

An interesting article on dansdata on creative uses of flash memory.  Vista has built-in support for using flash memory to improve system responsiveness, but the article also has suggestions for winXP users to speed things up using the latest high capacity flash drives.

http://www.dansdata.com/flashswap.htm

Basically, you buy 2 or 4 these cheap (under $5) CF to ATA adaptors, plug in your CF cards (up to 8 gig each nowadays) and set them up on an ATA RAID controller using striping, 0+1, or RAID 5.

I've thought about doing this to help speed up image editing...  Put my image collection (properly backed up) on a 16 Gig raid 0 setup (2 8 gig cards) with all the temp files also stashed on the CF card raid drive.  I think it would speed things up a bit.

Cost / performance is of course an issue, but I don't think you can buy this kind of read and seek latency performance no matter how much you pay, so the $10 for 2 adaptors and $75-$90 each for 8 Gig CF cards might make an interesting way to create a very fast 16 gig drive (or larger if you add more cards to the RAID array).

As for the write lifetime limit that flash memory has, Dan does some basic math and the conclusion is that a CF raid of decent size (gig or greater) ought to last for years so simply wearing out a drive like this just isn't a factor even if you were to use it for swap space.

[Reschke]

I have heard about this before and I think it sounds interesting. I will check that to read later tonight at home.

[Krusty]

The only problem is that a HD will read write and access data a helluva lot faster than a flash drive, and the flash drives can overheat with constant electrical impulses passing through them.

HDs will always be the better option, for stability, for security, for reliability.