Another idea, which we at VKernel.co.uk recently had, was taking a lateral view of the whole SSD Situation (Solid State Drive, a drive running basically on NAND Flash Drives similar to the ones you have in phones, digital cameras etc).
What if, (a question for the SAN guys mainly), you had a desktop PC board, with DDR2 Memory Risers (similar to Intel Caneland systems), which you could load chock full of low-price high speed DDR2. You then attached a large, cumbersome hard drive, 7200RPM IDE drive of ~ 500GB capacity, and a battery powerful enough to run the PC for around 1 minute. You then basically boot into the hard drive, which copies all the executable files into memory (RAM). Your hard drive then shuts itself off (into sleep mode), and your system runs entirely from memory – a lot faster than hard drive read/write access.
At the end of play, when you shutdown your PC, all the files which need saving (updated files) are transferred from RAM to the hard drive, so that you are then able to use them when you reboot. If the power to the computer is lost, there should be enough energy in the battery to allow the system to write the RAM contents to a “quick dump” on the hard drive, which the OS will sort out next time the system is booted.
This should speed up operating system use times significantly. If anyone is interested in working on this with me then please feel free to get in contact by dropping me an email at sam[at]vkernel.co.uk (replace the [at] with an @ obviously, this is done to help dodge the spam bots!).
Sam Marsh 2008 (c)
