Is this possible?

[Flustor]

I was thinking about an idea for a CDROM drive. I'd be interested in comments?

How difficult would it be for a cd to be spun once, stored in RAM built within the CD drive (it'd have to be 700MB of RAM ) and then the information read directly from the RAM rather than using the CD spinning mechanism?

[mendhak]

Requires the faster Cache memory. More expensive. Besides, we'd all have to buy these newer drives then, and it'd be all your fault.

[Jim Brown]

As you say, you would need a ****e-house full of memory, but otherwise, why not?

There was a thing called ramdrive or was it ramdisk? a number of years ago, where you just called some ram f: or whatever and then acted on that drive just like any other- eg copy files in and out etc.

If there's one thing that gets my goat it's that dammned CD cycling up and down all the time, and always being down when you need something off it.

[Wally Pipp]

Err .... Jimbo ... scottish flag ... did I miss something ?

[Guru]

It would take quite a while to load all the data from the CD into RAM; a lot of which might not be needed.

I go halfway there on my PC at home, I've got a 1GB partition which I copy thr entire contents of a CD onto if I'm going to use it a lot.
I do this because it is a lot quicker and the CDROM drive is piggin' noisy.


Interesting idea!

[Jim Brown]

Originally posted by Wally Pipp
Err .... Jimbo ... scottish flag ... did I miss something ?

Well the Mexican flag is a bit pointless now, and I'm a Scot at heart, if not by birth. (I'm a pom of Scottish parents.)

[Guru]

yeah stick another 700MB of RAM in your PC, set up a ramdrive (still possible on Win98, I don't know about other OSs) and give it a go

[Flustor]

Originally posted by Guru
It would take quite a while to load all the data from the CD into RAM; a lot of which might not be needed.

I thought about this, I think that there'd be many more heads (or even one very large one , which would enable the CD just to spin once and load all the data quickly.

[Arbiter]

I don't think it would be feasible due to piracy issues.

Make a RamDisk, copy a game CD into the memory and try running the game from there. 9/10 won't work.

It would have to be done as Flustor said with memory built into the CD deck. It would also take a couple of minutes to load everything into memory, but after that it would run damn fast.

The price of the CD drive would be through the roof though and not many people need that kind of speed.

[RSINGH]

Originally posted by Flustor


I thought about this, I think that there'd be many more heads (or even one very large one , which would enable the CD just to spin once and load all the data quickly.

I love it when you talk dirty.

[Flustor]

Originally posted by Arbiter
The price of the CD drive would be through the roof though and not many people need that kind of speed.

I know (about the pice thing) .. that's a bit of a flaw. But it'd make portable, personal CD players batterys last for ages . Moters use battery power really fast, if it only needed to spin until info was loaded into RAM it'd only be using power for the RAM which would be much less . Plus you could bump it around as much as you like (after loading) and no skipping of tracks

[Arbiter]

Keeping 700mb of RAM powered would also drain battery power fast. What we need is some kind of compression algorithm to reduce CD tracks to about one tenth of their size, then they could be stored in memory easily.

Oh wait!

That's an MP3 player!!

[Jethro]

Originally posted by Flustor


I thought about this, I think that there'd be many more heads (or even one very large one , which would enable the CD just to spin once and load all the data quickly.

I got to one head and just lost all track of the conversation....


Why Miss Fluster, sounds like it could have applications.....

[Wally Pipp]

sign me up for one !

Still waiting for your concept car with built-in jacuzzi and tennis court though ... any news on that ?

[Flustor]

Originally posted by Wally Pipp
sign me up for one !

Still waiting for your concept car with built-in jacuzzi and tennis court though ... any news on that ?

Yep you're order (Order number A3217-372) is in progress. I'm afraid you're only order of Blow-Up Susan (Order number A2812-312) is taking a little longer to get through customs than we thought.

[Flustor]

Originally posted by Arbiter
Keeping 700mb of RAM powered would also drain battery power fast.

I'm not sure about that, it's only really moving parts that are a big drain. CPU fans, Power fans and Monitors are the greatest power drain in computers.

[Si_the_geek]

If you check out recent Sony CD walkmans you'll find they have fast CD drives, which read in to RAM so you don't get skippage... you can even shake them as hard as you like for about 10-15 seconds once it's started playing with no effect at all on the sound!

[Flustor]

Originally posted by Si_the_geek
If you check out recent Sony CD walkmans you'll find they have fast CD drives, which read in to RAM so you don't get skippage... you can even shake them as hard as you like for about 10-15 seconds once it's started playing with no effect at all on the sound!

Bugger

That p1sses on my fire

[Si_the_geek]

sorry, didn't mean to bring watersports into it

haven't seen the same for computer CD drives tho', except the write-buffer on cd writers (which is typically only a couple of megs).

until the price of ram drops a bit it isn't really possible to have 700 MB - it would make drives about 5-10 times the price!

A few years ago I saw some software which would read a CD to the hard drive as soon as it was put in, of course this slows your computer down until it is finished, and you can't read of the CD at a decent speed until it is done

[plenderj]

Perfectly feasible and okay idea as far as im concerned.
You would just modify the cd-rom device driver to point to areas of this new RAM instead of the cd-rom itself