We are running a survey to help us improve the experience for all of our members. If you see the survey appear, please take the time to tell us about your experience if you can.
Let me begin from how i come to asking about this . Yesterday i was talking to my brother . As always eager to try every new gadget for pc's ,he wanted to see if he could instal vista on memory card and boot from it like from a hard disc. Now is my question - Did any of you see schematics of how to connect big ramdisks to ata or s-ata ports with a 8051. I assume it would be possible with SD cards or maybe even DDR2 with battery backup bcoz 8051 has port pins .
I hope you could shed some light on how to build this .
Have a nice eve Walkura
Isn't this a little heavy a task for a C51...?
"I assume it would be possible ... bcoz 8051 has port pins"
That is absolutely no basis whatsoever for drawing that conclusion!
It may or may not actually be possible - but you can't just conclude that it must be possible simply from the presence of "port pins"!!
Hi Walkura,
Thx for sharing a great unique idea. I had never thought of it befor.
You can easily implement it with a '51 but the best onw is any good FPGA. Visit any of following FPGA makers' websites, buy there low cost FPGA starter kit's and your done.
Off-course, you all need to know VHDL or Verilog or C2FPGA language which is a bit diferent to C++:
http://www.altera.com http://www.xilinx.com http://www.actel.com http://www.lattice.com
Wish more had interestin ideas like you.
Glad to have more feedback on the same from everybody.
Regards,
--micropar--
wait a minute. before we put the OP on the wrong path - can a processor such as the C51 even boot a windows OS? I am not such am ARM7 without an MMU can do that! Are you sure a C51 is a suitable tool for the job?
You seem to be mixing and matching.
In many cases, a RAM-disk is just a device driver allocating parts of your work-memory RAM into a virtual disk. No much different from caching of a real disk, but reduces fragmentation of the HDD and is faster since the normal disk caching will regularly write down changes to make them survive a power loss.
You can buy expensive, external, RAM-disk boards with a lot of memory and often a memory backup. But they are only useful if they have a very, very high bandwidth. Any solid-state memory will have way better seek times than a normal HDD, but to be meaningful, the transfer rates must also be at least close to the transfer rates of a HDD.
Do you expect that a 8051 processor can manage 50MB/s? Even 10MB/s is a very high data speed for an 8-bit processor.
In this case, it would be better to just connect a flash memory. It takes a very simple and cheap adapter to connect a CF memory to a PATA connector - the signals on the CF memory are almost identical, since the PATA connector came with the IDE - Integrated Drive Electronics - standard, where you basically connect the HDD directly to the PC AT bus. And a CF card is designed to connect to a subset of the PC AT bus, since it is intended for use in PCMCIA slots.
I don't think the request was to boot Windows in a C51, but to let the C51 emulate a disk.
ho, I misunderstood.
"Off-course, you all need to know VHDL or Verilog or C2FPGA language which is a bit diferent to C++:"
Either DDR2 or SD, large size of memory is required.
Installation Notes - Windows Vista eu.v-com.com/.../sup_os_Win_Vista.html
Minimum space to install: 7 GB (15 GB recommended)
16GB SATA SSD (Solid State Disk) is sold in US$200 or so. It supports OS installation.
For example, Transcend 16GB SSD ec.transcendusa.com/.../ItemDetail.asp
Tsuneo