PC OS's: hard drive vs. flash memory

[Kevin C. Tofel]

I was "booting" my Axim early this morning at the same time was I rebooting my XP desktop and I got to thinking as I was waiting and waiting for my PC: will we ever see an OS on a flash ROM chip that you just drop on a PC motherboard?

How much non-productive time do we spend waiting for PC's to boot every day at home & work, and what does that cost the economy? :evil:

Now that flash technologies are bringing multiple Gigabtyes of storage to market, we could (in theory) put an OS on some type of flashable storage, no? Service packs and other items could be added (again, in theory) and depending on the read speed of the memory, could our desktops & laptops one day be "instant on"? 8O

I'm sure there are several technical obstacles to overcome, but I'm curious if anyone else has any thoughts on this or has heard about this type of approach in the future.

KCT

[guinness]

I said SETI, beacuse I run my PC 24/7 and reboot every once in a blue moon. And unless flash technology becomes dirt cheap compared to hard drives, I doubt we'll see a full PC OS boot as fast as a PPC or Palm. Desktop OS's are also a lot more complex, I probably have about 200 MB of ram in use when I startup, I have a lot of stuff that I use all the time and it takes about 3-5 minutes to load. On my Axim, I don't really have anything, 10 seconds I'm up and running. The technology is probably there to run XP off of flash memory, but the cost would be through the roof.

[Kati Compton]

I find that XP boots quite speedy compared to earlier OS versions....

[Janak Parekh]

I find that XP boots quite speedy compared to earlier OS versions....
Yes, but nothing like BeOS. That OS was POST-to-startup in less than 10 seconds.

In any case, flash won't help you too much here. The vast majority of an OS boot is driver initialization, where it seeks and initializes peripherals. Hard drive overhead is there, but with modern hard drives the effect is minimized. Moreover, Windows XP uses special prefetching to reduce disk thrash when the OS is booted. We need to clamor for faster device initialization...

--janak