A computer with no HDD

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My friend was telling me about NVram (At least thats what I think he called it) and using it on our OC rig. He talked about using it in place of a hard drive, so there would be no moving parts. So everything could be access almost instantaneously. Either via Firewire or USB or the like. could someone enlighten me on this subject? Is there something I am misunderstanding?
 
Maybe i was wrong, or maybe it is a very powerful RAM good for storing lots of things. Like I said, I may have misunderstood. Any and all answers will be greatly appreciated.
 
Yeah, the only way to not have a harddrive is to have a PC with a bootstrap (which boots from the network)
 
DJ-CHRIS said:
Yeah, the only way to not have a harddrive is to have a PC with a bootstrap (which boots from the network)

Or one that boots from flash memory card,or floppy, or cdrom, or any other way an OS can be loaded into RAM.

Not hard to do, and with a decent amount of RAM you can do quite a bit without a hard drive in the system.
 
Yeah that's what I'm talking about, lots of flash memory with an OS loaded to it. That way there is no moving parts, no delay in read/write, everything is super fast. Balls out performance. But I'm not talking RAM, because when power is pulled from that it dumps everything. Flash memory type deals. Someone know where I can find an article or soemthing that talks about this idea? It's a swell one, and I would like to bring it to fruition on my machine.
 
Its already been done.Linux kernel even has a support option for the cramFS(cram filesystem)

http://www.tldp.com has all kinds of how-to articles, there's a few in there about the boot sequence and driveless systems

one thing about flash memory though, it has a short lifespan, and keeping the filesystem balanced and even is an issue in order to maximize the life of the flash memory you cant do everything like you normallly would

im currently working on a similar idea, boot from floppy into RAM, then use network storage to play mp3's, low parts count, and just mobo/cpu/floppy and power supply basically
 
I got the idea from my buddy, Polymorphic, because we are throwing this idea around. I dont know if you have run into him, he hangs alot in the Linux forum, but he is into writing alot of Linux stuff. It's just an idea, but it would be cool. Is there another technology like flash memory but with a longer lifespan? One that would be great for such an idea?
 
Well if you used a USB pendrive and a system with lots of RAM you could just make a filesystem in a RAM disk,and load the OS into RAM from the USB pendrive, that way the RAM takes all the wear.Its a perfectly good way of doing it, and pendrives are more than big enough, they just arent good for lots of data read/write cycles.
 
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