Timothy Murphy wrote: > > I was looking again at the specs for the OLPC machine > at <http://laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml> > and I see that this states explicitly "Drives: No rotating media". > As far as I can see it has a 1GB flash drive. > > As I understand it, this machine - do any actually exist? - runs Linux. > I wonder if this Linux is specially adapted in some way to use flash drives? > Yes, they exist. The BETA versions have been in the hands of some groups of children for a while, and the "finished" version is supposed to be on sale in November. The deal is that people in "developed" countries can buy 2, with one going to them, and one going to a child in a "developing" country. > I see the Asus Eee PC (perhaps a virtual machine?) also uses a flash drive > according to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC#Storage>. > > I'm still puzzled by the two entirely different takes on flash drives - > on the one hand, developments like OLPC seem to take them for granted, > while on the other people say they will have a short life. > One thing to keep in mind is that there is more then one type of flash drive. There are trade offs between the number of writes, and write speed. One way you can extend the life in applications like laptops is to buffer the writes in RAM, and flash the entire memory at once when you shutdown. I have not kept up on flash memory developments, but in the past, the devices that required you to flash the memory as one unit offered more writes, while being a lot slower to write to. There were also random write capable devices that traded write speed for increased number of write cycles. A write rate that would not be acceptable in a USB flash drive may be acceptable in a laptop drive where buffering writes in RAM can be used because you do not have to worry about the user removing the drive. Could you picture most peoples reactions if they had to wait 2 minutes or more before they could remove their flash drive? But for a built-in drive in a laptop, you can even do things like write to the drive after the laptop is "off". (Suspended, hibernating, or shutdown.) Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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