Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Surur
The HDD has a 64Mb partition, which takes the role of NVFS (Non-Volatile File System). This is "mirrored" to the executable RAM, so that everything is preserved in case of powerr loss. On bootup (e.g. after a soft reset) it takes 2 minutes to check the intergrity of the drive and load up the OS into the 32Mb RAM. For many people resets are quite frequent (the only failure mode it seems for a device without protected memory)
There is an application called sharkcache which will lock your databases to ram, so it wont be paged out by other software, but this itself causes many crashes.
The LifeDrive is very crashtastic. I sure hope when Dell implements their HDD PPC it does it a lot better (using real flash rom and real RAM). The 'HDD drive support in WM5' does worry me a bit. Do they mean th ability to use the HDD in place of flash storage? I'm sure that ppc would suck as much as the LD.
Surur
|
Here is a good explanation of how ram/Nand/HD is integrated into NVFS devices like the Lifedrive:
http://www.red-mercury.com/nvfs.html
I short the Lifedrive has:
HD total Size =4GB partitioned into 64 MB 'ram' and 3.86 GB user accessible...
Boot Code ?? (however other NVFS devices like T5, Treo have < 1 MB)
Compressed ROM (~14 MB)
User Data or Storage Heap [ram] (64 MB)
Internal Volume (3.86 GB)
RAM (Total Size = 32MB)
Decompressed Rom (16 MB)
DB Cache Area (10 MB) - to keep HD in sync with HD
Dynamic Heap (6 MB)
Thus you could say, modern NVFS based Palm's only really have 10 MB of actual ram! IMO, I wish palm would have increased the DB cache >10 to improve performance, but there are probably other mitigating factors like battery life etc to deal with too...
Apps like
SharkCache and
Resco Locker (latter is free btw) reduce lag by locking apps into the DB cache thereby reducing time to load...
I wonder how WM05 will execute it so called 'persistant memory' any differently than PalmOS...