Raspberry Pi users looking for a faster way to read and write files and data within their Raspberry Pi mini PC system might be interested in new Raspberry Pi 4MB F-RAMDisk which has been created by Shawn Quick.
The Raspberry Pi 4MB F-RAMDisk allows you to save your SDHC and offers 100 Trillion read or writes allowing you to expand the functionality of your Raspberry Pi. Watch the video after the jump to learn more about the Raspberry Pi 4MB F-RAMDisk project and see it in action.
“There are 2 million SDHC cards running in Raspberry Pi’s all over the world. Each SDHC is at risk of early failure because the Pi is constantly writing data to the Linux root partition stored on the SDHC. 10,000 writes and your Pi fails to boot, and your data and configuration is lost.
This project will develop an add-on card that will add a 1 to 4 Megabyte non-volatile disk using Ferroelectric RAM that will allow your SDHC to boot read-only, while still allowing Linux to write small databases, log-files, caches, configuration files, temporary files and many others that are changed during normal usage of the Pi; all without using precious kernel and application memory from the built in RAM disk or tmpfs (Plus, the files survive a reboot!).
Ferroelectric RAM (F-RAM) is almost the perfect RAM for embedded systems. It is as fast as SRAM with no erase/write cycles; it is completely non-volatile, requiring NO power or battery backup to retain data for up to 10 years; It has almost limitless read/write cycles unlike Flash and/or EEPROM which limits writes to 100,000 or 10,000 writes before device failure. The only 2 downsides of F-RAM is density/size and cost.
F-RAM can be read and written (a read is also a write) up to 100 trillion times. Big number? Think of it this way. You could write the same byte address to a F-RAM chip 1,000 times per SECOND every second, and the device would not fail for over 317 years. Doing the same thing to Flash memory (with 100,000 lifetime write limit), the device would fail in 100 seconds. (this is certainly not completely accurate due to wear-leveling algorithms that balance the writes to different addresses in Flash, but you can see that writes quickly add up) “
The 4MB F-RAMDisk project is currently over on the Kickstarter crowd funding website looking to raise enough pledges to make the jump from concept to production. So if you think Raspberry Pi 4MB F-RAMDisk is something you could benefit from, visit the Kickstarter website now to make a pledge and help the 4MB F-RAMDisk become a reality.
Source: Kickstarter
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