RAM based hardrives?

[ottscay]

Quite a few years agi a read a review in (the now defunct) 3dDesign magazine about a hardrive that was made out of RAM. The review said it was blazingly fast (duh), but that the cost of memory was too expensive to make it practical anytime soon. Well here we are in the year 2001, and I can buy 5 gigs of pc100 sdram for like $200, so why isn't anyone producing a similar product? Sure, you would still want a large platter based hard drive for common file sotrage, but it would be nice to put the OS and your 3d and 2d apps on one, and maybe have a second for files that are currently being used in production (e.g. texture map images). there are vast factories equipped to make cheap pc100 RAM, so if these products sold well, you could probably bring the price down significantly pretty soon. Does anyone know what happened to this great idea?

Scott

[gmask]

I haven't noticed any developments in this recently but some of the pitfalls of this idea besides the debatable expense is that conventional RAM has to continually receive power to remember what it's storing. FLASH ram does not need this but FLASH ram is much more expensive. One such RAM drive I saw actually had a matching Harddrive that it could dump to if it needed to be shutdown.

You could also use RAM disks to run apps off if your motherboard supports huge ammount sof ram. On PC's I don't know if you can boot from a RAM disk.. but you can on Macs. However if you shutdown the computer anything on the RAM disk will be lost unless you back it up.

g

[zerozeroone]

Slashdot.org had an article on this recently, try searching their site for Solid-State Drives

[gmask]

http://www.google.com/search?q=Solid-State...G=Google+Search
http://www.memtech.com/Prodinfo.htm
http://www.everythingusb.com/hardware/Stor...tate\_Drives.htm
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html

http://www.internetweek.com/reviews01/rev060401-4.htm
http://www.memoryplace.com/main/ss-intro.htm

g

[ripsting]

I believe Dell makes a solid state hard drive, it is 1.9 gigs, and will run you 4000 dollars. Looked it up the other day.

In reply to:
Quite a few years agi a read a review in (the now defunct) 3dDesign magazine about a hardrive that was made out of RAM. The review said it was blazingly fast (duh), but that the cost of memory was too expensive to make it practical anytime soon. Well here we are in the year 2001, and I can buy 5 gigs of pc100 sdram for like $200, so why isn't anyone producing a similar product? Sure, you would still want a large platter based hard drive for common file sotrage, but it would be nice to put the OS and your 3d and 2d apps on one, and maybe have a second for files that are currently being used in production (e.g. texture map images). there are vast factories equipped to make cheap pc100 RAM, so if these products sold well, you could probably bring the price down significantly pretty soon. Does anyone know what happened to this great idea?

Scott

The Chronicles I-X
they are coming, be ready

[juan-sanchez]

gmask, sorry to be so finickey, but you said
"On PC's I don't know if you can boot from a RAM disk.. but you can on Macs",...
HOW the hell can you do this ?... I've worked on them for years, and think I know more than a little about them, but've never heard of being able to boot from a RAM disk.
Is this due to the ability to save the RAM disk to HD on shutdown ? -I thought you had to re-mount the disk manually after start-up....

[gmask]

HOW the hell can you do this ?... I've worked on them for years, and think I know more than a little about them, but've never heard of being able to boot from a RAM disk.

You've worked with Mac or PCs? Anyway on the Mac once you've set a RAM disk it mounts automatically. As long as you don't do a shutdown the contents on the RAM disk are held in Memory.. during a restart power is maintained.

This kind of operation has been possible on Unix systems for years and is known as diskless booting. In some cases you could boot your system from a tape on another system on the network. It's not quite the same as a RAM disk but the point is that the OS doesn't care where it's loaded from once it's in memory.

For the Mac there have been thirdparty RAM disk programms that automaticaly backup the contents of the RAM disk and replace them after a shutdown or coldboot. However you you pulll the plug on the computer the software can only restore what was previously backedup. Then in order to boot from the disk you'd have to restart again with the RAM disk set as the startup disk.

g

[juan-sanchez]

Ah, I see....
Thanks for your time & reply, I'm going to find time to try this as it could be useful for simpler disk repair / antivirus scans.

I was saying I've been brought-up on Mac's, since 1989, and getting onto the second hand LC475's the college had

I've worked with RAM disks [notably with Softimage 3.9, on Win2000, on VPC4, on a G4 with 1.5G RAM installed -just to prove it's possible], 'suppose I've never re-booted as opposed to shutting down whilst using one....
hence my apparent ignorance.

-It's only since I became the owner of a Wintel box that I've learnt the joys of mid-session re-booting.

[gmask]

It definately helps to have a large amount of RAM available to make use of this feature. Using to do virus scans is good if for some reason you can't boot from a CD.

g