Mini PC onboard

The main concern I would have with a solid state disk drive is how many write cycles they can cope with. I haven't been keeping up with the technology and perhaps the number of writes is so high now it is not a problem, but I would at least be sure of how many writes it is rated for. With windows, which does tend to make use of the hard disk for swap file I would be concerned about the disk dieing of old age prematurely. As suggested, I'm sure there are things you could do to minimise the writes windows make, but there are certainly versions of Linux that can run ENTIRELY in RAM once loaded from disk.

Good luck,

Chris
 
I have been wondering if it might be possible to use a laptop but remove the hard drive and boot it from a USB stick with additional USB sticks for storage. With 8GB USB sticks down to about £30, if it would work, I could use 4 x 8GB sticks in a cheap 4 port hub giving 32GB of solid state storage for £120 and with prices falling / GB's increasing all the time it would be cheap to expand the capacity in the future. Could it work?
 
The SSD I have in mind is the 8GB IDE Flash Memory Module 80% of the way down this page

Specifications:
Operating Temperature: 0°C - 70°C;
Endurance: 2,000,000 Program/Erase cycles;
MTBF: 1,000,000 hours;
Durability of Connector: 10,000 times

I really have no idea if 2 milion write/erase cycles is a lot or not.
Things I was thinking about are

1. The full 1GB RAM should reduce the need for disk access
2. Can I plug in a 2Gb USB flash drive and tell windows to use that for swap space rather than its primary drive??

I would appreciate comments on that

I am no windows expert - I use a Mac for everything else, but I am painfully aware that XP is very bloated and very hard to configure. Someone suggested TinyXP, Googling it suggests that it is 'illegal' and I am reluctant to go that route. But I did find a link to a piece of software called XPlite which claims to allow you to configure XP and strip it down to 350Mb (as opposed to 1.2Gb for the standard installation)

An alternative might be to use Win98 or win2000. I have checked that all of my software would run under these. But future releases probably would not and the lack of current patches makes me worry. It would in fact hardly ever be connected to the internet, except for patching, so maybe that is not an issue.


What do people think?


EDIT: Just looked at my winXP laptop and I see that I can change the size and location of its 'Paging file'. How about if I set this to 2Gb on a (very cheap, very tiny) 2Gb USB drive I have?
 
I am rather vague about this but it seems that not all solid state drives are 'bootable' and I am not sure you could boot from a USB flash drive - try it! If not you could plug a bootable IDE SSD drive straight onto the connector for the hard drive. That would certainly work and you could add working disk space as USB drives. My concern would be that USB flash is notoriously unreliable, I have had several fail. You would probably be more secure to stay with a conventional HDD!


I also presume that USB disk access is slower than IDE. I would like comments on that as it would impact my wheeze to put windows swap space on a USB drive.
 
You can now buy 32GB waterproof USB drives here for $250 and probably elsewhere even cheaper. If you want more here's a link to a 64GB drive, though it's a little dearer...

Remember the SSD are slower to write to though they read faster and that power consumption is quite high too. In terms of resilience I'd probably more worried about memory chips becoming unseated than hard disks crashing, though you probably reseat the memory chips and reboot.
 
Out of interest I have just ordered a back-up laptop to our main one (intend to use the main one for photo's DVDs, WiFi etc, and the one I've just got for SailMail and SeaPro). IBM T23, Pentium III, for £60+VAT from:
http://www.sterlingxs.co.uk/scpages/ibmthinkpadt23DVDRW.html

Seems like a good price - has 90 day warranty too.

I used one of these two years back as my work laptop and it was the most reliable one I've ever had.

At that price you could have 5 for the price of the Mini PC base unit along (and thats before adding a monitor, keyboard and mouse).

Jonny
 
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