RAM Drive?!?!

[wacki]

Just wondering, Since RAM is so cheap, anyone know of any good solid state RAM drive companies? Anything thats upgradeable, and PCI compatable would be nice.

 

[rhawk79]

a company called cenatek sells a 4GB PC100 RAM drive for $900...although I'm assuming you could buy the smallest one and then just add the RAM yourself...it's in the form of a PCI card...it's still not bootable but the website indicates that future versions will be...i would just love to see how fast windows would start up on it

 

[MournSanity]

Link, link! I have to see these RAM drives

 

[rhawk79]

http://www.cenatek.com/

 

[wacki]

Thanks rhawk79 that was very helpful.

 

[MikeMike]

um it would only boot up as fast as scsi, since its limited by the pci bus and thats only 133 mhz if im not mistaken.

MIKE

 

[wacki]

With prices starting at $599.00 USD, the Rocket Drive DL offers the best price/ performance in the industry!

nourdmrolNMT1 said "um it would only boot up as fast as scsi, since its limited by the pci bus and thats only 133 mhz if im not mistaken."

You are right, but not in all cases.

The standard 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus has a maximum bandwidth of 133MB/sec. That's shared for all devices connected to the PCI bus, including a SCSI PCI card and any other installed PCI cards. Server/Workstation boards come with multiple and higher-bandwidth PCI buses.

PCI32 33MHz = 133MB/s
PCI32 66MHz = 266MB/s
PCI64 33MHz = 266MB/s
PCI64 66MHz = 533MB/s
PCI-X 133MHz = 1066MB/s

So if you have a Tyan motherboard, its a totally different game!
Also PCI express will also change that for the average user.

 

[rhawk79]

Originally posted by: nourdmrolNMT1
um it would only boot up as fast as scsi, since its limited by the pci bus and thats only 133 mhz if im not mistaken.

MIKE

actually if you look on the right hand side of the webpage, ocaddiction reviwed the ram drive. they said sustained transfer rates fully saturate the pci bus at 133mbps...even the fastest scsi drive will only hit 80mbps...i think it would still be better than scsi raid because access times will be hundreds of time lower than scsi, which is already far better than ide.

 

[rhawk79]

well...pci-x and pci-express are two different things. the pci slots on a granstdale motherboard won't be faster than existing slots. but if they made a pci-express version then that would most certainly help.

 

[wacki]

rhawk79 just out of curiousity what do you do for a living?

 

[rhawk79]

actually i'm a student...why?

 

[wacki]

Just wondering, you sound like you know what your talking about. Thats all, besides not very many students know buses that well.

 

[magomago]

Wouldn't you lose all that info once the computer turns off?

 

[wacki]

No, a lithium or nicad battery keeps the data safe.... at least in the RAM drives I've seen

 

[rhawk79]

Originally posted by: magomago
Wouldn't you lose all that info once the computer turns off?

for the cenatek one, yes you would. it has an ac adapter that plugs into the back of the pci card. so obviously a battery backup is recommended.

in my opinion, this would be fine if you had a battery backup that would last for one hour...and software that could automatically backup the data to a hard disk anytime this happens...and then restore it when the power comes back... but i don't know if such software exists.

 

[randumb]

The Cenatek one takes PC133 ram. It's the Platypus one that takes PC100 ram.

And btw, solid state and scsi is not even a contest. Solid state pwnz. Ram will always be faster than a hard drive.

 

[rhawk79]

Originally posted by: randumb
The Cenatek one takes PC133 ram. It's the Platypus one that takes PC100 ram.

And btw, solid state and scsi is not even a contest. Solid state pwnz. Ram will always be faster than a hard drive.

Exactly!! and PC133 RAM is how old? That alone says enough about the gap between solid state memory and hard drives.

 

[charlie21]

Access time for PC100 RAM: 8 ns
Access time for Fujitsu MAS series drives: 330000 ns

 

[OverVolt]

I gotta get me one of dem!

Whats the max you can hook up? $500 for 4Gb is kinda expensixe tho.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: charlie21
Access time for PC100 RAM: 8 ns
Access time for Fujitsu MAS series drives: 330000 ns

For the Fujitsu drive, it's 3.3ms. Wouldn't that then be 3,300µs, and then 3,300,000ns? I think that math is right anyway, or maybe I'm just dazed from just waking up.
Either way, RAM has access times thousands of times faster than hard drives.


I don't relish the idea of a RAMdrive that needs a battery or constant power supply to retain all of its data. All it would take is one computer illiterate person, who's misinterpreted a memo, to go and change the battery for the RAMdrive while it's unplugged. Or something like that anyway. You'd need to constantly keep the RAMdrive backed up to something permanent, so you'd be using a slow hard drive anyway.

 

[wacki]

Why would a computer illiterate person be using a ram drive anyway?

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: rhawk79

Originally posted by: magomago
Wouldn't you lose all that info once the computer turns off?

for the cenatek one, yes you would. it has an ac adapter that plugs into the back of the pci card. so obviously a battery backup is recommended.

A high-capacity UPS would definitely be recommended.

in my opinion, this would be fine if you had a battery backup that would last for one hour...and software that could automatically backup the data to a hard disk anytime this happens...and then restore it when the power comes back... but i don't know if such software exists.

The APC PowerChute software has the capability to run any command(s) before doing an automatic shutdown, so it wouldn't seem too hard to write a little batch file that would xcopy the files onto a spare hard drive for the purpose. Then, another batch file could be used on startup to reformat and copy the files back onto the ram disk.