Hi folks!
I think I heard somewhere that Windows Vista would be able to "use usb flash disks as ram". This is sort of weird, but it gave me the idea to use a USB flash disk as cache space for your regular disk.
Indeed, flash memory is of course much faster than HDDs, and could provide a pretty cheap way to increase performance for disk-intensive operations.
Of course, flash memory "wears" after a while, so for this to work, there has to be "bad sector" checking at some point...
Is there an easy way to tell Ubuntu to use a particular memory space as disk cache?
Otherwise, I will do it myself, but I have a few linux-programming related questions (hence the sub-forum choice):
- Where to I intercept HDD read/write events? I'd guess this is at kernel level, but where, more specifically? In theory I'd guess this would be just above the driver, correct?
- What do you suggest I should use as a filesystem for the cache space? Ideally, it should be a filesystem designed for error-prone memory (since flash wears out after a while)... I have very little understanding of filesystem internals: is a "bad sector checking" algorithm a common thing in filesystems?
Is it reasonable (ressources wise) to do it every read and write access (in ubuntu I believe filesystem checking is only done once every 30 mounts)? I mean a partial check of course, not a full scan of the whole disk cache, like a way to check if the data you retrieve from the cache is corrupted or not.
- Do you think the disk access speed gain would be interesting, in regard of the ressources needed for filesystem maintenance?
Thanks a lot for your input all!
- trib'
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