The Operating System on Flash

Flash memory, used in the ubiquitous USB thumb drives, has been happily chugging along to Moore's Law for a while now and they've managed to get high enough capacities at low enough prices that it's perfectly feasible to have a computer's internal drive entirely made up of fast flash memory. Still, they're a little pricey yet and these new solid state drives can't hold the sheer quantity of data as their older and more refined disk-based predecessors.

In the meantime, I've been wondering: Why not use a chip or two for some targeted speed improvements? Say, for example, putting the operating system on a flash chip.

The idea is simply to mount a single 4, 8 or 16 GB flash chip on the computer's motherboard and use it to store critical files. Core operating system files, for example, and regularly accessed operating system data. Perhaps even a half-handful of frequently used applications that can fit in the remaining space, such as the web browser.

It's clearly possible. During the recent public introduction of Apple's latest Mac operating system, code named Snow Leopard, Bertrand Serlet mentioned it had been shrunk by 6 GB, or "over half the footprint of the OS." That puts it at under 6GB for the entire OS and storing 6GB of data on flash memory isn't an expensive proposition at all. According to iSuppli's tear down of the recently re-designed iPod Shuffle, a 4GB flash memory chip costs about $6. Prices have probably dropped since then and Apple usually adds a markup of 30%, so let's say the total cost of our 6GB of flash memory is $8.

For the price, most or all of the operating system could be stored on flash, speeding up booting time substantially against the slow hard disk drives laptops generally have. Any further drive work the OS has to do with its own core data would also be faster but I confess I don't know enough about the inner workings of the operating system to be able to guess where those improvements would be.

Ah, who cares? As a MacBook Air owner, which have really slow hard drives, I'm happy to pay eight bucks just for the boot speed.

I've actually been waiting for this to happen for a while and it's now got to the point where the window is closing. Solid state drives are just beginning to encroach on the territory staked out by hard disk drives in laptops. Right now, an solid state drives a little more expensive and store quite a bit less data but it won't be long until laptop hard drives are overtaken by their solid state cousins and become standard.