Is any hardware ramdisk worth it?

[magreen]

I was having a hard time finding info on ramdisks. Are any of them practical, available and inexpensive?

It seems to me with ram so cheap now it'd be easy to find 8gb of ddr2-667 for <$50.
So I started to think of standalone ramdisks -- such as an expansion card or somesuch. It seems to me it'd need to work thru the PCI-e or at least PCI channel since SATA 300MB/s can't keep up with memory transfer rates.

Something like that could be completely usable even on a 32-bit OS, since the OS isn't even aware it's not an hdd, right?

But I couldn't find much info on it, nor anything inexpensive.
I saw the Gigabyte I-ram but it doesn't seem to be very available -- Newegg doesn't even carry it, and the specs say it uses ddr, not ddr2.

Is a ramdisk just a dead idea?

 

[Denithor]

Acard 9010/9010B

They ain't cheap but the performance is blazing. i-RAM gives about the same performance but only offers 4GB capacity using DDR memory, versus these drives with up to 64GB capacity (on the pro model) using cheaper DDR2 memory.

Take a look at our previous discussion on these drives and some preliminary benchmarking performed by a member here.

 

[magreen]

Thanx, I saw that thread. But it ain't cheap, like u said. Any reason it has to be so expensive? I mean even a $40 mobo can handle 8gb of ram nowadays, so how much more expensive does a standalone card need to be? Is it just the economies of scale, that it's a specialty item so it's $$?

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: magreen
Is it just the economies of scale, that it's a specialty item so it's $$?

Bingo. If they become popular the price will fall drastically.

The biggest problem with these drives is that they connect by SATA which severely limits the bandwidth. Heck, the new Intel SSD rivals these in raw data transfer speeds.

If you could find a motherboard with support for 16GB DDR2 you could use like 6GB for system memory and the other 10GB as a RAMdisk. But even that would be quite expensive because 4GB modules aren't cheap.

 

[her209]

I wouldn't go with hardware RAMDISK unless I was maxed out on the motherboard memory limit.

 

[tynopik]

Originally posted by: her209
I wouldn't go with hardware RAMDISK unless I was maxed out on the motherboard memory limit.

the one huge advantage of a hardware ramdisk is that it doesn't disappear if your system crashes

once a piece of data is written, it stays written