Affordable RamDisk?

Actually I think 2Gb RAM stick prices will be falling soon, the PSP demand for them will be what will drive the price down.
 
digitalwanderer said:
Actually I think 2Gb RAM stick prices will be falling soon, the PSP demand for them will be what will drive the price down.
Click to expand...

I think we're talking two different things here. :D
 
Shame about the power issue - that'd make running an O/S off it a bit iffy.

Would make a nice scratch disk though.
 
MuFu said:
Shame about the power issue - that'd make running an O/S off it a bit iffy.

Would make a nice scratch disk though.
Click to expand...

Well so long as the 16hrs with out power is true I think it might work well in most environments. Of course you'd definitely want a backup copy of your OS residing somewhere a bit more perminant so that you don't have to reinstall it if something does happen.

At least for how I use my computer it would certainly be nice, though I think I'd spend my money on system ram first. But if I did have money left over this looks to be a worthy investment.
 
Killer-Kris said:
MuFu said:
Shame about the power issue - that'd make running an O/S off it a bit iffy.

Would make a nice scratch disk though.
Click to expand...

Well so long as the 16hrs with out power is true I think it might work well in most environments. Of course you'd definitely want a backup copy of your OS residing somewhere a bit more perminant so that you don't have to reinstall it if something does happen.

At least for how I use my computer it would certainly be nice, though I think I'd spend my money on system ram first. But if I did have money left over this looks to be a worthy investment.
Click to expand...
The OS should be put onto a flash disk. A ram disk like this should be used for pagefile, temporary files, or the like.
 
Killer-Kris said:
I think we're talking two different things here. :D
Click to expand...
Yup, you're right. Sorry, my bad...I got PSP on the brain. :oops:

Flash would suck for HDs since it can only be re-written a certain number of times compared to conventional which can be re-written pretty much infinately for all practical purposes....right Russ, that's what you mean?
 
Flash does have a limited number of write cycles, but its 100K or something like that.

Its not bad for mass storage, but using it for a scratch disk is pretty much asking for trouble.

Anyways, if you install the OS on flash,you have very short access times (100uSec) and reasonable throughput.

A scratch disk in RAM would be uber quick. And then use a HD for the large storage requirements.
 
The only real benefit of this that I can think of would be for pagefile use. Of course you could install a program on it such as photoshop, then watch the program start up in 1 second.
 
This particular ramdisk card is a bit dumb IMO because all it uses the PCI slot for is drawing power, and on top of that it grabs a SATA connector too. :?

It would have been a much more attractive solution if it was a PCI mass-storage implementation instead like any other add-in controller card. Data transfer performance would be slightly lower with PCI (but higher with PCIe), but that is almost never the limiting factor anyway, rather it's access time that matters and that would be no different.

If it also was a PCI controller card with a harddrive backup option as well which was what I first thought it was when I saw the picture of the card, now that would have REALLY rocked! It would have been great if it used PCI bus for data transfers, and then used a reserved area of any harddrive attached to the on-card SATA connector to backup the card's memory to in the event of a power loss. Add a small laptop drive to that which could be hidden away somewhere in any modern PC case (doesn't even need to run constantly), and you got a really neat storage solution...
 
All,

I hope they make some sweet software for it. I would love it if I could flag HL2 folder on another drive to be cached by this solid state drive. If it sells well, maybe they might add some nice features. I would love to be able to hook up a HD to this and use the memory as a cache for often used files/folders.

Currently I have 4 GB of system ram and either a 4GB or 8GB solid state drive in my home system. It is hard to find a good game benchmark as most games limit HD activity. At one time I tried to install EverQuest on it and my zone times got much faster, but not anything that changed my game experience. It gets to be a pain to copy games over to run off the fast ram drive, I wish it was automated in some way. I would love to see the drive used as a precache for game folders.

Hmm, can't wait see what happens with this. You could always raid a few for not only larger capacity but also greater bandwidth. Dual SATA II might be able to get to 600MB/s, depends on overhead. I would be interested to see how they work. Oh, I hope address 13 is routed so we can get up to 4GB modules (very spendy)! =)
 
Video editors need large arrays with high sequential transfer rates. This thing is very small and has very low random access figures. It would be much better suited as an OS/page file drive.
 
I can't see how this could be better for file caching or page file instead of having it as real RAM. I mean, you can use it to "tell" the OS to cache certain files but again, it wouldn't be much different than creating a regular RAM drive. It could help a bit if your memory upgrades are limited, but not by much and it painfully reminds me of EMS on 286s which required software support to take full advantage of.

The only real purpose I can see is using it as a temporary files folder and a better score on the geek-meter.
 
Anything that has crazy random access will benefit.

(Except, as you note, putting your pagefile on it. That seems patently silly. Unless, of course, you put slow ram on this board, and fast ram in your motherboard)
 
This sounds great. I currently have a 4GB partition that holds Windows XP, all my often used applications, and a 1GB swap file. This RAM disk could decrease my boot time and speed up all my general computing tasks without creating any noise. If I have my storage hard drives spin down after 5 minutes of inactivity, the sound my computer produces would most likely finally drop below the ambient noise level in my apartment.

Power isn't really an issue. The battery is just there to cover unexpected power outages. The PCI slots receive enough electricity to keep the RAM refreshed even when the computer is turned off.
 
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