I got another idea, this time on how you could improve your computer's bootspeed, and make preserving data really simple.

Basically, what you do is when building your PC, or with your already built PC, get an SSD or other sort of flash memory and install your OS onto that. It doesn't need to be that big, just enough to hold your OS plus a bit of extra space. Then, you put in another drive, just an HDD, and run all of your programs and other files from there. This way, your OS boots much faster due to the flash drive, and if you ever stuff up your OS, you can always reinstall it without worrying about having to back up your data because it's all on a separate drive. I don't know what sort of tweaking you'd have to do to get the secondary drive set as your desktop and stuff, but that's my idea. What do you guys think?

(This post was last modified: 16/04/2008 12:49 PM by Chroma.)

yeah, but I'm just talking about a desktop with 2 drives in it

just buy a readyboost capable flash drive and set it to boot from there...

http://www.directron.com/cmfusb2016gb.html?ref=lmcd + http://www.usboot.org/tiki-index.php

I think you guys misunderstand. My idea isn't to boot from an external drive, but an internal one. Meh, whatever, I'm not gonna be able to try it for a while so it doesn't really matter anyway lol

for your information...running windows from a flash drive or usb thumb drive is REEAAALLL slow...

your best bet is 2x 80gb sata2 drives in raid0.

and ready boost capable thumbdrives are VERY sketchy!

I did a lot of research on those...turns out almost all of them have the first XXMB of flash memory in high quality high speed for quick bursts of speed, the rest is crappy and slow.

Until i found the Corsair Flash Survivor GT.  THIS chip is FAST!  But for 8gb it was $150 (probably less now) but the non GT is VERY SLOW in comparison!!

Even that sucked to run windows from AND when enabling ready boost, things just took longer to do anything...

(This post was last modified: 16/04/2008 01:51 PM by SchmilK.)

then theres the nightmare of updating system files - what happens when your windows directory finally gets soo clogged up the ssd is filled? that's right - windows crashes (as usual - thanks microsoft).
in theory its a good idea but in practice its not. slow loading, size limits, bandwidth limits (usb does a maximum speed of 60 MB per second and that's only burst speed - its much less for a sustained transfer), and finally requiring a bios that can boot from a flash disk makes it unworkable. your best bet is an ultra fast raid array as mentioned as that's about the fastest thing wee can boot from.
now i wonder how slow a network boot would be...:P