There are at least two advantages with regard to flash stick that I can
immediately think of relatively to hard drive.
First, flash memory has no moving parts. (Is any one aware that the
separation between the magnetic head and the disc surface is less than
20 Angstroms and the disc is spinning at an average speed of OVER 10,000
miles per hour?) Second, the access time of flash memory is measured in
nanoseconds, thus, there is no latency compared to hard disc, which
typically has an access time measured in miniseconds.
Some new generations of USB 2.0 compliant compact flash sticks can write
faster than read (and can read and write simultaneously). While the
write speed is currently maxed out below 10 MB/s, the technology is
evolving very rapidly. If a market exists, a single channel USB 2.0
compliant CF disc may reach 60 MB/s. This is similar to the speed of
ATA/66. Eventually, who knows, there may be multiple-channel CF discs.
And that will be a totally different story.
Wayne
I am very suprised no one sells PC like this. All of the ones I found were
cash registers or the like, no general purpose PC's. I would think this
would be great for routers, firewalls, etc. High high availabilty stuff.
Given all of the limitations that have been described, I don't see how
it's all that useful to use CF in a high-availability environment like
a router or firewall.
PCs are cheap enough now that you can deploy a pair of fully-redundant
PCs running Linux (or any other Unix-ish OS), on relatively fast hard
drives, for a few hundred dollars. Why would you do anything else?
Why bother with the added complexity of CF?
