Can Magnetic Tape Be Used as an External Storage Device for PCs?

[chosenone]

what if you put ram chips in the hard drive itself to store information on it with the normal drive.what you could do is store windows and private files you don't want people to access when your on line there.and go between them on you computer.so if your hard drive crashes.you can boot windows from ram and put it back on the hard drive and all your files are saved fro being erased!

 

[STAii]

Ram will get arased when you restart.
So actually, you cannot 'boot' from RAM, since booting needs restarting.
Also note that the RAM chips are a bit too expensive for saving an operating system.
Windows (nowadays) needs about 300 MB (minimally !), so just try to think how much money you will need to pay only for the posibility of a crash .

On the other hand you can have a similar idea, that is a little better.

Having 2 hard disks, one for booting, and the other for daily use (and with another copy of the boot stuff just in case).

Or you can use special hardware like the Magic Card , check out this link.

 

[russ_watters]

These are called ramdrives and they exist already. STAii is correct in that when you turn off the power you lose the memory, but ramdrives have batteries and so are always on. They otherwise act exactly like a regular hard drive. They are fast but small and expensive.

 

[Raavin]

A hard drive crash without some serious issues with the running of your machine is probably unlikely anyway. A 2 drive RAID system (there are a couple of setups, one for speed and one for redundancy) is probably better. If your HD died, chances are your data is ruined. Even good data recovery techniques are a pain from from a ruined harddrive. Expecting anything more than text files is a big ask. Certainly being able to boot the system from it would be unlikely.

I'm not sure exactly why you'd want to reboot a system that crashed back to the same crashed condition anyway. I suppose a small bit of memory for storing documents as you were working on them might be handy though.

Raavin

 

[damgo]

There are also non-volatile RAM storage devices... the best known being those snazzy new flash memory cards that act as hard disks for digital cameras, etc. They don't lose their contents without power, and are compact, quiet, and have no moving parts. But again, they're more expensive than hard disks.

 

[MacTech]

RAM drives actually have kinda been what apple has been doing with os 9, wher eyou could make a ram disk, same priciple.. anyway...

actually if you were to get to use MRAM it basicly is solid state memory which has a ton of potental.

 

[Mudvaynelethaldosage]

Here's an idea I came up with when I was really stoned. So stoned in fact, I was falling off my skateboard. Use a line out from your pc (USB port maybe) to an external device. That would record files you sent it on magnetic tape (like a cassette). It would then clip off the tape so that you have the file on a magnetic tape that is very portable. Then you could use a similar mechanism to read the tape and send it to a pc.
I repeat that I was really stoned when I came up with this.