Floppy RAID! An idea whose time has come.

[jaywallen]

Non-volatile RAM drives were a sweet setup at one time. And that was when memory was EXPENSIVE. I used an always on CP/M machine in a lab and owned an Apple //e with an 8 MB battery-backed RAM card. I used to blow IBM PC owners' minds by turning on the Apple and showing them my 8 MB instant on "hard drive"! (They were loading from cassettes back then.)

 

[randypj]

jaywallen--I'd sure like to have one. With RAM prices, it seems like they could go mainstream pretty easily, no? Are hard drive manufacturers missing the boat? What are we missing here. It seems like they could make some purchase committments with a major RAM mfg., and get a discount over going rate?
--Randy

 

[jaywallen]

I don't really know that the logistics would work out. Back when I had those non-volatile RAM disks those were really only for the raving loonies, or for people who had serious work to do and needed more-or-less instant-on systems. But the operating systems were so different. These days they're optimized to make a different sort of use of both volatile memory and hard drive. The operating systems we use now were developed, apparently, with the idea that mass storage was always going to mostly be done on hard drives (or something with similar price per unit storage advantages). Even though RAM is very cheap, it still doesn't compete on a dollar for dollar basis with the hard drive. The way the operating systems are designed now, I'm not sure how much of a performance advantage a user would realize with a large RAM disk. So many factors figure into the determination of real world performance. It's not so easy to radically change the behavior of an OS to fit a new performance tuning paradigm as it was a few years ago. Too many variables to take into account in those millions of lines of code. In a way I guess you could say that it's another case of the lowest common denominator winning in the marketplace, instead of the out-and-out best performance solution. It's a pretty common outcome these days in just about any technology. Giving up on the idea of ultlimate performance in favor of wider dissemination and a broader market appeal (fewer denaro for adequate performance rather that big bucks for big bang).

Regards,
Jim

 

[randypj]

Jim,

Good points all. But, if the market is out there, and the price is right.....

How hard could it be to make a RAM drive emulate a hard drive. Ok...yeah, possibly only one partition, but still.....wouldn't you be talking almost instantaneous access? Sure, the OS might have to come off a physical drive, but can you imagine the load times for FPS games and stuff like Adobe Photo?
--Randy

 

[Bozz]

Ever heard of a bottleneck called the PCI bus

 

[Doctorweir]

1000 floppies are also $500 basic investment...

I'm sure you get a bigger harddisk for that than 1.44 GB...

EDIT: Not to mention the 1000x $15 for the drives...

 

[Sugadaddy]

Hard drives made of RAM do exist, they're called SSD's, and they cost a crapload of $$$. Do a search for the Quantum Rushmore. Making a drive with ram is easy, but the problem is RAM loses all its data when there's no electricity going through it, so you'd lose everything when shutting down.

 

[jaywallen]

Yeah, but external solutions aren't really in the spirit of the standalone gamer's answer to the need / desire for a faster hard drive. And using volatile RAM just doesn't make sense, at least not to me. If you have to go ahead and load the danged thing every time you crank up the system, why bother with it? The old non-volatile and battery-backed volatile RAM cards were more in keeping with the general idea of providing super-rapid system response times for loading and running software. I even had a little Toshiba notebook (T1000 was the model number, I believe.) that had a "hard RAM disk". It had DOS in ROM, so the entire RAM disk was configurable as a software / data drive. The system was an absolute hoot to use.

 

[Jumpman6]

WOOOOO he needs to give up now ! what's the use of a drive that won't work in dos when we have to install Oses from scracth or come back off a system failure.....LOSER:Q

 

[randypj]

I could live with the PCI bus bottleneck.

I could even live with it being volatile RAM.

For games....as long as you saved the game/characters on a physical drive, you could always reload the game and saves. Heck, even now, I leave my pc on for days at a time, never coming out of a game.
--Randy

 

[jaywallen]

randypj

Heh-heh. Looks like you are afflicted with a serious gaming "jones" there. I admire that! I'm considering developing a bad habit or two myself.

Regards,
Jim

 

[shathal]

Hrmm .. the access times would be abyssmal ... and a 1000 Floppy drive-cage (more like -ROOM) would be somewhat more expensive to do than a nifty HD-RAID + controller.

Plus - you'd be swapping out Floppies all the time, unless you use really high-quality ones, then you'd only be replacing them most of the time .

Bizarre thought & amusing. Yet impractical .