(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Can you imagin a 60mb puppy on a 10GB 1 inch HD in a 60 watt thin client with 1 GB of RAM?


http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000347026121/

By the way does anyone out there no the specs on the micro hd drive vs the flash drive? Power consumption, cycle life, transfer rate,....

In spite of the improvements in the tiny hard disks, it looks as though the tide is running in the direction of flash memory. See this article:


The article mentions the iPod Nano, and you would expect Samsung to be talking up their flash memory because it is used in the Nano.

In terms of power consumption, the latest Hitachi microdrives need about 300ma at 3.3v or 5v. My older 2.5" drive draws around 500ma, just squeaks in when attached via USB.
CF cards draw around 100ma (according to usbview), and USB flash drives vary between 100ma and 200ma. Plenty of power for other things if using a 60W power supply.

Thanks. That's what I was looking for.


" and the crowd goes wild..."

It seems to me that for most practical uses the important difference between flash memory and hard disk drives is their failure modes. Flash memory seems to have no dominant failure mode, other than flash memory cells slowly begin to lose their ability to remember after they've been written to and erased approximately a million times. (To maximize the life of a flash memory, therefore, some flash memory file system algorithms spread the writing around on the available memory as evenly as possible.) This suggests that flash memory will normally fail slowly and gradually, or "gracefully," if you can say that of any failure, giving plenty of warning and time to replace it.

Hard disk drives, by contrast, are famous for sudden unpredictable failures which result in the loss of all the data on the hard drive. One minute the *@#! thing works and the next minute it's junk.

These two very different failure modes suggest different modes of use. Disk drives require a robust backup and recovery strategy to be strictly followed. Flash memory on the other hand, when used in place of a hard drive allows for a much more relaxed attitude to backups.

Samsung Unveils New Flash Memory Chip
http://www.wtopnews.com/index.php?nid=108&sid=568580

How about the 16GB version?