Carputer (basically In Car Computer)

[Liiger]

wondering how long the hdd will last with the usually stiff suspension in most skylines.

Most hard drives are pretty tough now a days. I've dropped a few and they still running fine. If you mount the hard drive sideways as opposed to flat, you'll lengthen the life of the hard drive too.

[parish]

FINISHED!

[Liiger]

OOO niice, pics pics PICS!

[Primordial]

Most hard drives are pretty tough now a days. I've dropped a few and they still running fine. If you mount the hard drive sideways as opposed to flat, you'll lengthen the life of the hard drive too.

Yeah they are fairly tough, but I dont expect mine to last much more than a year though... HDD's definitely dont like to be moving when they're spinning! The price of laptop hard drives is cheap now anyway.. You can get a 60GB for $110!

The only way to counter this is with a flash hard drive, but they cost an arm, a leg, and your 1st born child's soul unfortunately.

Like, try $117,887 (yes, ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN THOUSAND!) for a Memtech 98GB Flash SATA Hard Drive! Pretty silly when you remember that 4GB USB memory sticks are only $160 now!

[Liiger]

Yeah, thinking of getting just a 1gig usb2 stick to run windows from. Probably be lighting fast to boot up and shut down on. Probably the only down side of a car PC is that, taking time to boot up.

[Primordial]

That shouldnt be an issue!

Go to Mp3car.com and search "tweaks".. Find guides to disable services and crap the pc doesnt need etc... This will shave a lot of time off your boot up from cold.

I havent optimised mine yet, and its running at about 20 sec's boot resuming from Hibernate! By the time I get into the car, and wait for the LCD screen to slide out and up, the thing is pretty much booted! I think I have to look at a black screen for only 2-3 seconds! Youre using Hibernate and not shutting it down every time are you?

[Liiger]

The Opus Power supply takes care of the hibernating and shutting down. I think its like when ignition is turned off - goto hibernate - then 15mins after shutdown. Alls I'm saying is that if windows boots quick (20 secs) from a standard hard drive. imagine how fast it'd run from flash memory.

Got some pics of your install Prim?

[Primordial]

Ahh ok.. yeah booting from flash would be very quick!

I havent got pics at the moment.. I'll post some up tonight if I get a chance. The only thing you can see is the lilliput 7" motorised touchscreen in the dash. It's difficult to even see the laptop as it's mounted under the drivers seat on a docking station so i can remove it easily.

Which front end are you running?

[funkymonkey]

i thought HDD read rates were still leagues faster than a USB flash drive?

[Primordial]

Yeah thats what you would expect... The read rate and transfer rate are two different things. The transfer rate of USB2 is up to 480MBit/s... Where an average HDD is only about 120Mbit/s...

The READ rate (how quickly the drive can pick up data off the platter) on a HDD is usually between 30 and 70mbit/s...

So the read rate on the USB flash could be faster or slower... Im not too sure. But the Bus/transfer rate on USB2 flash disks is certainly higher. Whether or not thats the actual rate that data is read off the flash chips is another kettle of fish!

^^ This isnt gospel... it's just what I understand from the small amount of research i've done!

I guess the best way to test it would be to copy a 100MB file from a USB2 > HDD, and then do the same file from a HDD > HDD. If the HDD>HDD test is faster, then you've got your answer!

There is a huge amount of issues regarding booting from USB2 disks though

[parish]

Here it is guys

Car PC build