(meteorobs) OT -Reverse of Ram Drive(Disk) in meteor detectionsoftware.

[Chris Peterson]

I'm not sure why the Sentinel system has such a long lag. The ancient Metrec 
software writes meteor data to the disk so quickly that there's almost no 
chance of missing a meteor. The Windows meteor capture software I'm working 
on has no lag- it can be recording a meteor while a previous meteor is being 
processed and saved to disk. That's not at all a problem with today's fast 
processors and multithreaded applications.

None of this involves doing anything with the hard disk, which is inherently 
slow. Meteor image frames get stored in RAM during acquisition. At around 10 
MB per second uncompressed, you can record a very long event, and be writing 
it to disk even as you are storing a second event in RAM. You don't need to 
increase effective RAM, you can simply increase actual RAM.

Chris

*****************************************
Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "stange" <stange34 at sbcglobal.net>
To: <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2008 9:09 PM
Subject: (meteorobs) OT -Reverse of Ram Drive(Disk) in meteor 
detectionsoftware.


> Question. Is it possible to do a reversal of what a Ram Disk does? e.g.,
> Partition or designate a portion of a hard drive to act as memory where
> incoming data is stored by this hard drive memory until it stops, then 
> that
> data is acquired & processed by the meteor software program at a more
> convenient time between meteor events without losing a "Watch time"?
>
> The purpose here is to increase effective RAM, reduce down time between
> meteor recordings, allow (new) meteor data to come into memory even before
> the previous data has been fully processed by the softare program. This
> would make the hard drive a direct recording instrument without trying to 
> do
> any processing at the same time.
>
> Researching on-line has not indicated this has been invented yet. But I 
> sure
> could use it in each my 3 meteor monitoring computers.
>
> I am sending a copy of this to Joseph who designed the Sentinel software
> with Richard. It may be that the Sentinel digitizer box does "some" of 
> this
> function?
>
> YCSentinel