PCI card with ram slots

[imported_jambo]

I saw something similar to what I want on Newegg, but i just want a pci card with ram slots, and no processor slots, just ram on a PCI card. no PCIe!

 

[Peter]

You are aware that these don't work as expansions to your system RAM?

 

[gaidin123]

Cenatek is the only vendor that I know of that has what you're asking for. These show up as RAM drives/Hard drives to the system and require an external power adapter in order to preserve contents on shutdown.

They only go up to 4GB and it's $3k for that.

Gaidin

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: gaidin123
They only go up to 4GB and it's $3k for that.

That is quite possibly the biggest rip-off I've seen in a long while. Check out this guy's sales pitch...umm...I mean 'independent review':

"Again, this is MANY orders of magnitude faster than hard drives and can be particularly beneficial with many files on the disk related to the work occurring (such as websites and/or webpage caching, or databases with many files, indexes, or tablespaces)."

Independent Review of CENATEK Rocket Drive

An order of magnitude is generally defined as ten times greater. According to his tests, for a mere $3000 you can shave 3 seconds off the time it takes to zip or unzip a 451MB file:

LARGE FILE TEST

Using CENATEK Rocket Drive:
ZIP - 137 seconds
UNZIP - 22 seconds

Using Western Digital Caviar SE 7200RPM ATA/100 HDD:
ZIP - 140 seconds
UNZIP - 25 seconds


SMALL FILES ZIP/UNZIP TEST (1,117 files)

Using CENATEK Rocket Drive:
ZIP - 32 seconds
UNZIP - 16 seconds

Using Western Digital HDD:
ZIP - 42 seconds
UNZIP - 30 seconds


WOW! With so "many orders of magnitude" faster performance, this is a must have! A real bargain at $3000.

The best ATA/IDE HDDs are already saturating effective PCI bandwidth, even if this used DDR RAM instead of SDR, it wouldn't be any faster as the PCI bus would be the bottleneck. And I notice he used a PIII platform as a testbed, with HDD performance probably limited by attachment directly to the PCI bus on an older platform. A newer chipset like NFORCE2 or NFORCE3 with high speed I/O interconnect and native SATA/150 would eliminate any advantage the Rocket Drive may have had.

I find it hard to believe any of these have been sold. If it were $300 instead of $3000, there still wouldn't be much point to it. It would have been an interesting solution back in 1997 or 1998, though.