Can You Make thumbdrive from ram ?

[thelamer]

I have a massive pile of ram sitting around the majority of it ecc and useless . Is their any way to somehow turn this into either a thumbdrive or some kind of storage device ( to possibly run my os off of . I am good with an iron and am not afraid of breaking stuff .

Let me know .

 

[lapierrem]

well, if it's DDR, Gigabyte is coming out with a new adapter for a ram hard drive ...it was discussed at computex, supposedly out in july/august at $50 street price... basically takes your ram on a card (uses the pci slot for power only), and uses the sata bus so it appears as a hard drive...battery backed up. Looks cool to me

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

RAM loses all its memory when you turn your computer off, so no, you won't be able to use it as a thumb drive. The Gigabyte ramdisk fits 4 sticks of DDR and has a battery that lasts like 10 hours or so I think.

 

[corkyg]

There's volatile memory and non-volatile memory. RAM is volatile. If you can create a circuit and power source to make it non-volatile, yes - there is a technical possibility. But - from a business perspective it would be a fool's errand.

 

[thelamer]

Thanks guys that ddr card sounds interesting . I wonder what kind of performance increaces you get from it .

And after seeing a pic of that card it looks pretty cool .
http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=33094

 

[Zepper]

Most RAM would require refresh circuitry and a battery backup to hold data thru a power off. True static RAM would not require the refresh circuitry but would still need battery backup.

.bh.

 

[HomicidalSloth]

Yeah, it'd have to be powered 24/7 or it would lose all of the data... Not practical - or safe, imho

 

[MobiusPizza]

Yes, as mentioned by others, RAM are volitile. Unlike Flash memory which are in tumbdrives, although much more expensive; data remains even power is cut. RAM loses all data when power is cut

 

[Ze Mad Doktor]

Smart thing for Gigabyte to do would create some sort of RAID mimicking software that writes to the HDD in case of power and battery failure.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Originally posted by: Ze Mad Doktor
Smart thing for Gigabyte to do would create some sort of RAID mimicking software that writes to the HDD in case of power and battery failure.

No doesn't work.
The battery is only used when the system is powered off to keep data alive. Since the system is off, even if the battery power is low, the HDD has no power to save the data.
Only thing possible is to have an alarm like mobile phone with low batteries.

 

[Varun]

Does modern Ram refresh itself even or is that done by the memory controller? SD/DDR Ram is made up of 1 capacitor per bit, and the capacitors have to be constantly recharged, so I don't think you can just keep power on the Ram even if you were trying to make it into some sort of thumbdrive.

 

[ryanv12]

I think I'd use that thing for my virtual memory instead of my regular harddrive....would be a lot faster!

 

[theMan]

how about this: when the system shuts down, it copies everything onto the HD, and when it boots up, everything goes back to the ram???

 

[SVT Cobra]

Originally posted by: theman
how about this: when the system shuts down, it copies everything onto the HD, and when it boots up, everything goes back to the ram???

to un efficient...especially if you are using it for your OS...how would you like to write your OS to your HD everytime you powered down...now if you had a special file for something then maybe...

 

[SirBrass]

Originally posted by: corkyg
There's volatile memory and non-volatile memory. RAM is volatile. If you can create a circuit and power source to make it non-volatile, yes - there is a technical possibility. But - from a business perspective it would be a fool's errand.

Agreed. Thumbdrives use non-volatile flash memory (iirc) for storing data, not RAM.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Originally posted by: Son of a N00b

Originally posted by: theman
how about this: when the system shuts down, it copies everything onto the HD, and when it boots up, everything goes back to the ram???

to un efficient...especially if you are using it for your OS...how would you like to write your OS to your HD everytime you powered down...now if you had a special file for something then maybe...

agreed. Also, if you have 1GB of that kind of RAM storage, it would take forever to wait for the files to be copied then shutdown. And it would take forever to load from the HDD and fill back the memory
Basically the computer will then take forever to start up and shutdown.

 

[TomKazansky]

rechargable batteries when u plug it in usb port and then uses the battery when it is unpluged?