Being the very impatient type, I am always on the lookout for new things that will make my system. I have discovered flash drives!

Has anyone heard of these things? From what I can tell, they use solid memory to record data, and the makes the PC think it is a disk drive. The neat thing about them is that they are very durable, and extremely fast, with an average .5 seek time and up to 100Mbits/sec transfer rates.

The down side seems to be their storage handling. But I was thinking that it should be possible to configure the Linux kernel the way I want with all the libs and other needed componets and be fairly small to fit. Things like /usr and of course /home could stay on a regular disk. But what do you think a kernel would take up in memory size?

It is possible. There are many minimalistic distros (1.44MB floppy) with all needed utilities. It's not hard to build such one. 4MB for a filesystem is enough.

The people at work use them. They connect into the USB and are these tiny pen disks - holding up to 5 gig! Linux should recognise it as a USB device and I think they would probably put their personal stuff on the flash drive - a modern equivalent of a sneakernet!

Bert

The seek time appears to be amazingly fast, but isn't the burst speed on drives now (ata133) at 133mb/sec burst? So "up to" is what regular drives are doing, am I wrong?

Yeah, they are at 133 right now, and the flash drives are 100, but the data access time is so fast I seriously doubt you would see much of a difference in speed.

Hmmm...

I was reading in a magazine about folks building new PC's w/o floppy drives and using these flash drives instead.

My question is, can you boot to them? I guess as long as your BIOS can boot to USB you should be ok. Could you turn one of these flash drives into a boot disk?

j.

Well see these drive that I am looking at are not hooked up to USB, but through the regular IDE ports. The drive itself has an IDE controller, so it is operating system independant.

I guess you could boot off a USB drive too, the hard part would be getting the BIOS to call it a boot device. As for linux you could just install to an IDE and build a custom kernel with USB built in then edit fstab and throw it all on your USB flash card

If you are looking at an IDE drive it should work in linux, you may need to add support for IDE other or whatever the kernel module is unless it works with the generic IDE HDD kernel driver. That would depend on how much they made it look like a "regular" ide hdd.