PCI card with OS on it?? Sounds interesting

[FoxyLoxy]

I was sayin a long time ago that I think they should make a MOBO with a microdrive or something right on the mobo with enough space for an OS. How freckin sweet and fast would THAT be! Man think about the transfer rates, wow. Additionally then you wouldnt have the OS on a normal drive which has many different advantages. Anyway I saw this artcle on THG and I'm sure many of you read it, just wondered what you guys thought. It has a ways to go but it sounds pretty dang good so far.
Good ol Tom's!

 

[Kubel]

Yeah I saw this a while back on another review site. I think it's a step in the right direction, but with the speed potential of DDR RAM, why develop a new piece of technology on an old standard.

1) They are using SATA-I. Why not use SATA-II? This is a major bottleneck when looking at the bandwidth capability of PC2100.

2) The battery is only sufficient to power the RAM for 16-hours when there is no AC power to the motherboard. Once that time expires, bye-bye data.

3) Multi-Channel operation is not supported. But since there's a bottleneck mentioned in #1, this is irrelevant.

4) Read/Write speed is obviously much faster than RAID-0, but in real world conditions, the difference is not as abvious. For example, it only shaved 4 seconds off XP boot time compared to a Raptor.

It's a good idea, but I'de rather see solid state drives get cheaper and faster, and a new standard be used besides SATA I/II that doesn't bottleneck its speed.

 

[gaara]

Why not build a processor with 1TB of L1 cache and just eliminate the hard drive/memory altogether? This stuff is a good idea, but we don't have the technology for such a thing yet, and even if we did, it'd cost a fortune