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Solid State Hard Disk Drive ("cheap" RAM drive)
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Dec 1999
Status:
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Solid state HDDs have been around, albiet $10,000 for that Toshiba. This is a nifty card that plugs into your PCI slot. It's basically 4 RAM slots with an SATA controller on it. You fill it with RAM (I assume a maximum of 8GBs) and you have one super fast HDD.
The performance is insane.
How about a 9 second boot for Windows XP. 
The only draw back is that because it's memory, it needs a constant power source. The thingy has a built in battery and will last for up to 16 hours. But if the power goes out or if your computer is tucked away (like if you're moving or something) then the data will be lost.
Also, it's bottlenecked by the PCI slot.
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"…I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F. Roberts
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Nov 2002
Status:
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This reminds me of an old MacOS Classic feature called "RAM Disk."
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: In bits and pieces on Cloud City
Status:
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No doubt hard drives will be replaced with solid state soon, except perhaps for huge servers. Problem is now they just aren't big enough and it is too expensive, but that is always the case with new technology.
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"Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough!"
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2001
Status:
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RAM disk was amazing. Everything was so damn fast.
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Baninated
Join Date: Sep 2005
Status:
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Originally Posted by gethigh
This reminds me of an old MacOS Classic feature called "RAM Disk."
Heh. Yeah.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2000
Location: Detroit
Status:
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My VAX OpenVMS cluster (7 VAX nodes at the time) use to boot its system from a RAM disk at work. As we started adding more and more Alphas into the cluster, the RAM disk just wasn't cost effective anymore. It finally went to the recycler a couple years ago; and we only have Alphas now anyway.
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Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Silicon Valley
Status:
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Please make this card mac compatible. If it is I want one for X-mas
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Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Silicon Valley
Status:
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Please make this card mac compatible. If it is I want one for X-mas
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Capitol City
Status:
Offline
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It would be great for a dedicated swap volume. 8GB of super fast Swap on top of 8 GB of active memory, should be able to handle what you're working on at a given time.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: BFE
Status:
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RAM is still very expensive compared to HD space (per GB).
I can see someone creating a computer that uses RAM instead of a HD for primary functions, but as long as OSes keep bloating to use up the processing power and memory sizes as they grow, it's not likely going to happen.
The cheap solution is never shut down the machine. Fast boot times by not booting!
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I'm a bird. I am the 1% (of pets).
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jun 2000
Status:
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Dec 1999
Status:
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Originally Posted by DeathMan
It would be great for a dedicated swap volume. 8GB of super fast Swap on top of 8 GB of active memory, should be able to handle what you're working on at a given time.
 The article says it's roughly 10x faster than a 10,000 RPM HDD. So that'd speed up things quite a bit.
The computer would need to support SATA, though. I'm wondering if it'd work in a G5.
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"…I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F. Roberts
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Australia
Status:
Offline
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Originally Posted by Eriamjh
RAM is still very expensive compared to HD space (per GB).
I can see someone creating a computer that uses RAM instead of a HD for primary functions, but as long as OSes keep bloating to use up the processing power and memory sizes as they grow, it's not likely going to happen.
Apple are going to do this with the second revision of Intel Powerbooks, its going to be so Tiny.
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Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Nagoya
Status:
Offline
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i'm thinking the intel laptops, probably not the first rev, but certainly by the 3rd will have 20 - 40gb flash HDs... nanostyle. i don't know about this ramdrive though. ram is certainly costly, as mentioned.
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12" iBook 1.2ghz / 1.2gb
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Amboy Navada, Canadia.
Status:
Offline
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Sigh, I can remember when I could boot off a RAM disk. I had to pare down the system a bit, but did it ever fly.
Flash is making strides, but it can never replace our current magnetic drives, limited writes. RAM would be much more reliable (once well tested, ECC, and shielded), excepting the battery-backed issue. I'd say that this thing would be nice for a backed-up boot volume and cache, as long as ethernet/VGA is kept on a seperate bus, or if this was with a PCI-E 4x card. I see it's transferring over SATA, I'm wondering why they picked that over PCI-E.
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[img]broken link[/img]
This insanity brought to you by:
The French CBC, driving antenna users mad since 1937.
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