Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 12:52:23 +0200 From: Marten van de Kraats <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I just had a thought, wouldn't it be excellent if one could use one of these new pocket memory sticks instead of a hard drive!!!
Cost not a problem, size not a problem, power down not a problem.
I remember a discussion about this subject some years ago. Maybe someone did a bit of research. You might wanna google for it. Personally I use a zipdrive (pretty silent) for startup
A similar option would be an MO drive such as the Fujitsu DynaMO 640 SCSI drive. The disk pretty much only spins while the thing is being accessed. And it holds 640 MB per cartridge rather than 100 MB. On the other hand, the drive is more expensive. On the gripping hand, hte media is much cheaper than ZIP on a per megabyte basis ($10 - $15 per 640 MB, vs. $5 - $10 per 100 MB). I recently found a clean working DynaMO 640 at Goodwill with power supply and one cartridge for $5...
In another arena--the old Outbound Model 125 is basically a Mac Plus or SE in a Laptop case with a 640 X 400 LCD display. One interesting feature (out of many interesting innovations) was that the machine has four extra SIMM sockets in addition to those used for system RAM.
The four additional RAM sockets are dedicated to a RAM disk. You can install 256K through 4 MB SIMMs in those sockets in any combination to create a bootable, persistent (as long as the battery holds out) RAM disk. So, one can have a 16 MB RAM disk built into the Outbound Laptop Model 125. With the hard drive spun down (a software option), operation is silent and very fast and just like a Mac Plus or SE.
I have not yet tried installing 16 MB SIMMs in the RAM disk slots. The specs only mention 4 MB SIMMs, but 16 MB SIMMs may not have existed at the time.
However, with a full 16 MB RAM disk installed, the battery runs down in about 24 hours with the machine off. That is, even with the machine off, maintaining the RAM disk runs the battery down in 24 hours. Of course, this isn't a problem on a desktop with a wall power available.
An idea/fantasy of mine is to build 30 pin SIMMs using Static RAM chips and install those in the RAM disk sockets of the Outbound Laptop. Static RAM chips use much less power than DRAM. Unfortunately, they're also accessed in a very different manner. Some additional logic would have to be added to the boards to translate between the Row/column addressing of DRAM and the straight binary address mode of static RAM. That's not that hard. The biggest problem is that the old 30 pin SIMMs are on .050" circuit boards and all the special deals for cheap printed circuit boards are for .062" thickness.
Jeff Walther
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