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Hi All,
Ed Anderson <eanderson@carolina.rr.com> wrote:
Boy, now here is an example of what kind of information we have access to on
this list. Now that Ernest mentions it, yeah, I recall that the heads of
the hard disk float on a cushion of air - but, I would never have thought to
associate altitude with hard drive crashes! Thanks Ernest.
Indeed, if you want to run your computer at high altitude, you pretty much have two options: pressurization or solid-
state storage. That's why the hand-helds, e.g. Palm and iPAQ, are so widely used in homebrew avionics applications. Solid-state disks became a technical darling in the early nineties, after a big jump in memory / price ratio. One of the popular solutions for laptop-sized units is the USB memory. Many current-production notebooks offer the ability to boot from a USB device. The main limitation is the size of the OS, which for "Win-tel" systems can eat up most of a 512MB "memory stick". The all-but-obvious solution is to flash to OS into ROM just like the handhelds do. Here are some links that may shed some light on a solution or two:
http://mae.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=129777&KEYWORD=Texas%20Memory%20Systems
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/solid-state/
http://www.industrialpc.com/flash.htm
Regards,
Dale R.
COZY MkIV-R13B #1254
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