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