Does the Operating System need to be on a hard drive?

[Scott Ames]

With flash drives up to 32 gig now, why don't computer manufacturers put the operating system on an internal flash drive of some type and forget the slower hard drive? Maybe they do and I just don't know. It would sure boot faster.

[jplanigan]

You can get solid state drives now that give a significant performance boost.

It would be a bad idea to use a flash drive for anything that does a lot of writes because they have a limited lifespan and they give no indication before failing. Once they fail, you can't recover anything as far as I know.

Patrick

[mikeyman120]

That sounds cool! You would be able to carry a tiny flash drive and plug into any pc anywhere and have your own pc and desktop with all your work on it.

Mike

[HomeComputerGames]

Ipod, your cell phone, hand held gaming systems, and many others. They all have operating systems with no hard drive.

It will happen for larger systems.

[KenS]

Actually they DO. Some of the more high end notebooks now have hybrid flash and magnetic drives.

I say "high end" because they are still a lot more expensive that a regular spinning HD. The term for these drives is "SSD" though. Flash usually refers to the thumb drives in the listings.

Anyway, you can put an OS on just about anything these days as long as the BIOS supports it. CDs and flash drives can easily boot an OS, and in fact you will find many linux sites dedicated to "live CDs" that allow you do download the OS and create a bootable flash drive with it.

cheers

Ken

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by Scott Ames

With flash drives up to 32 gig now, why don't computer manufacturers put the operating system on an internal flash drive of some type and forget the slower hard drive?

The write limitation is the major reason, as someone else mentioned.

Vista has ReadyBoost, which hybridises your file access and speeds things up significantly.

[jacktackett]

Flash drives are painfully slow - and as others have said prone to failure. Given that, there are several Linux distributions that can boot from flash drives.

Many appliance level devices use solid state memory, both ROM and RAM, instead of hard drives. But this memory is pretty expensive compared to other types of storage. But has its uses.

I've used them to boot embedded systems - most folks do. Drives consume a lot of power and anything mechanical wears out over time.

I've used them (solid state drives) to hold indices to sort database tables too - that was pretty amazing - it reduced a database operation from 6 hours to something like 20 minutes. Of course back in the day that drive cost me 100K too. A little more than a flash drive ;-)

And things like ipods sometimes do have tiny hard drives!

Still - makes me wish the old mag bubbles could have stored more memory.

--Jack