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RAM Drives, are they worth it?

D

DirtylilTechBoy

Senior member
I have seen companies that take a stick of ram 128/512/1 gig whatever, and make it into a hard drive. Would this be a good idea for a server? For instance, get a one gig ram drive for a cold fusion server, or use a one gig ram drive for the VAR partition in a linux server?

What would be another good application for this?

Thanks!

Jason
 
Ram drives are volatile, any loss in power means loss of data in ram drive.

if you had enough memeory to run a quake server or someother game in ram, and not effect system performance that would be an ideal use for a ram drive. if you copied your coldfusion apps and ran it from the ramdrive that would be sufficient, but i wouldn't chance it with some like a /var.
 
When I was still using my old mobo w/ 768mb pc133. I had a 200mb RAM Drive which I used it to work on big files. Plus it came in handy when trying those little apps your not sure about. 😉 Since then I had upgraded to a DDR mobo and only got 256mb ram right now. I think I'm going to go for 1gig total in DDR ram and setup my RAM drive back up again.

When I had the 768mb pc133 system going. I re-done the ram drive so I could load UT on to it. To see what she would do and boy did it load fast. 😀

[edit]Since then also I bought my self a UPS. Which now I could load stuff within RAM drive and don't have to worry about the power going out. 😉
 
I don't think we are talking about the same thing. I am talking about a ram drive seperate of the system ram that plugs into the ide channel like a hard drive, but it is actually a ram chip with a battery so it is always on and doesn't loose information when you shut down. They make them in 512/1 gig/ and 2 gig models.
 
I think you are talking about NVRAM. I have never seen NVRAM products in the sizes you are describing. Can you post a link, if you have one to a site that sells these.
 
If you can afford one of those MTDs (Memory Technology Devices IIRC) it'll be the fastest storage you own, and probably the smallest too. One of those might be good for a mail spool of a very busy server, but AFAIK even the busiest mail servers now make due just find with large RAID5 arrays which are probably comparable in price and a lot larger.

The OS filesystem cache is usually good enough unless memory gets tight, but even then getting more memory is easier and cheaper than one of those drives. So personally I don't think they're worth it just yet.
 
Rather than use physical ram to make a ram drive. A manufacturer (forgot its name starts with an S) has got a PCI card that can take upto 4GB of PC133 RAM to act as a RAM Disk.. best part.. its got an onboard battery so if you reboot your data stays right where it was.

We got one at work (we were testing it out).. its not too expensive.. if you buy it with their ram then its like 900 bucks (2gb), but if you buy the card and put in your own ram its like 125 bucks for the card.

TGG
 
The idea of storing important data in Ram between reboots is a little frightening :Q
Knowing my luck the battery would die at the wrong moment...
 
I believe the battery is a CR205 (the standard battery on the mobo) and it has a capacitor (well a big capacitor) on the car which we presume is for when the battery goes dead.
 
how about those little usb pen drives? A person could possibly use them as a root harddrive.

Install Zipslack on it (slackware at <= 100megs) and You would boot off of a floppy disk and into that... That way you could carry your OS around with you in your pocket!
 
Originally posted by: drag
how about those little usb pen drives? A person could possibly use them as a root harddrive.

Install Zipslack on it (slackware at <= 100megs) and You would boot off of a floppy disk and into that... That way you could carry your OS around with you in your pocket!
Click to expand...

I may be wrong but I don't think you can boot off a USB storage device. Also, unless it's USB 2.0 it will be as slow as heck (if there is such a term).


🙂atwl
 
Your persistant comment reminded me of the best ram drive I ever used, back on the Amiga. The authors realized that memory wasn't cleared by the os at startup or during a reboot so they 'searched' memory for their signature and could 'recover' the ram drive accross reboots. You would wind up setting it up once (usually with dev tools and whatnot) and it would 'work' until you finally killed the power.

I wish I could find something like that for XP 🙂

Bill
 
I know you couldn't boot off of the USB drive unless the bios supported something funky like that... But I was thinking you could use a floppy bootdisk to boot into it. It wouldn't be noticably slow unless you used a a bunch of GUI apps.... I think it you be good for a administrator, you could carry around a full sized OS and hack into any computer no matter how f-ed up the hardrives or OS is... just a thought, It's non-volitile would be a hell-of-alot cheaper than a RAM drive, but I guess a ram drive would be a hell-of-alot faster.... hehe
 
Originally posted by: drag
I know you couldn't boot off of the USB drive unless the bios supported something funky like that... But I was thinking you could use a floppy bootdisk to boot into it. It wouldn't be noticably slow unless you used a a bunch of GUI apps.... I think it you be good for a administrator, you could carry around a full sized OS and hack into any computer no matter how f-ed up the hardrives or OS is... just a thought, It's non-volitile would be a hell-of-alot cheaper than a RAM drive, but I guess a ram drive would be a hell-of-alot faster.... hehe
Click to expand...

It's about time that BIOS makers start including support for more USB stuff. At least add support for booting off of USB storage devices, like USB floppies, USB Zip, and USB flash cards/pens/whatever. I don't know what's taking them so long.

 
It's about time that BIOS makers start including support for more USB stuff. At least add support for booting off of USB storage devices, like USB floppies, USB Zip, and USB flash cards/pens/whatever. I don't know what's taking them so long.
Click to expand...

The biggest reason is probably USB is a lot more complicated than ATA or even SCSI, its still not 100% reliable to identify all USB devices, mainly because of stupid manufacturers doing things like fixing bugs and adding features without changing the revision numbers on devices. USB was never designed with BIOS access in mind (except for keyboards I guess) so retrofitting it on will probably suck for all involved.
 
Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

It's about time that BIOS makers start including support for more USB stuff. At least add support for booting off of USB storage devices, like USB floppies, USB Zip, and USB flash cards/pens/whatever. I don't know what's taking them so long.
Click to expand...

forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you CAN boot from a USB floppy drive. At least - my Fujitsu P-2040 is SET by factory default to boot from the USB floppy drive that it comes with.
 
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