Thing is, how long until Vista reads some important stuff from your flash drive, and you end up with a buggered program / load of data.

Flash drives can only be written to, so-many-times until they are knackered, afaik.

I hope theres some kind of safety device in place, because using Flash like swap is going to shorten their life-time quite drastically, I imagine on a system with < 1GB of RAM or whatever.

Quote from: snellgroveThing is, how long until Vista reads some important stuff from your flash drive, and you end up with a buggered program / load of data.

Flash drives can only be written to, so-many-times until they are knackered, afaik.

I hope theres some kind of safety device in place, because using Flash like swap is going to shorten their life-time quite drastically, I imagine on a system with < 1GB of RAM or whatever.

The idea would be to have nothing else on the disk other than the cache I would presume.

Only certain flash devices have limited write times, also flash devices are rather cheap to replace. It was also meant to be used primarily with solid state storage, as opposed to flash, but it apparantly has the capability there if you need it , Its only a matter of time until most hard drives become hybrid and incorporate some form of solid state storage to act as a buffer/cache, in fact samsung have already developed one. Just a sign of things to come

So, some dont have a limited life?

thats good...

be difficult to replace the one inside a hard drive unless its designed to outlast the hard drives lifespan (i.e. drive becomes useless because things like 400GB just isnt anywhere near enough :shock: )

Solid state caches are gonna be great for laptop batteries

Beaker et al, I cant believe you are slagging off Microsoft for using a solid, reliable and tried and tested kernel as the framework, rather than writing a new one from scratch with the obvious repurcussions of bugs, poor optimisation, security flaws and loopholes.  

Quote from: Clockd 0NeBeaker et al, I cant believe you are slagging off Microsoft for using a solid, reliable and tried and tested kernel as the framework, rather than writing a new one from scratch with the obvious repurcussions of bugs, poor optimisation, security flaws and loopholes.  

heh, im not slagging, its just nothing new.  If they had included WinFS in 1st release then it would justify what it is going to cost.  Neither FAT32 or NTFS could ever be described as a "good" filsystem.  If they had branded this up as "Windows 2003 Professional" they would have been more on target.  considering the fact is 4/5 years late i was expecting more, as it is they pretty much bolted a shiny resource hungry front end on what isnt really a bad Kernel.  Win2k3 runs perfectly well on my Duron1300/512mb server, and that uses onboard everything, with shared GFX.  Its hunk of junk and its still pretty slick.  Im considering swapping the HDD out and installing Vista to see how it actually runs on there.

WinFS would have been great I agree, but Id rather have it at a later date when I know that it works than have them slop it together and it all collapse 6 months down the line. A file system needs rigorous testing I would imagine.

Youd be gutted if 6 months down the line it corrupted itself because the file database got too big and you lost all your data.

they have had more than enough time to develop a WinFS and make it stable though.  They where trying to develop it before XP came out, IIRC it was origionally sceduled for release with W2k3.  from what little i gleaned its using a *nix style file system where one large file goes down in one large block as opposed to scattering it all over the disk.  Itll make it fast, but surely they could have taken lessons from other sources?

Im dissapointed that Vista is going to need new style HDDs and the like to get the best out of it as well.  While the flash memory in the HDD will cut boot times down im guessing its not going to be totally writable, it cant be unless you are allowing only a limit to the number of writes to the cache.  Nice idea, but Im not too sure they arent forcing this because they need the extra performance boost youll get over reliability.  The drives may work perfectly, they may not, ill hold back on judgement, but im not betting they will be massively reliable for a few years.

The samsung hybrid drive technology is not related to anything vista like. Itll work under any operating system.