Ram drives? do they exist? Reasonable?

[zkaudio]

I do audio editing and am looking to build an ultra fast system. I saw something in a pc maga few months ago that was essentially a pcix card w/ about 8 ddr slots on it. It had a power source that would last like 4 years and was essentially a hard drive made up of ram. I would like to put my os and editing software files on one of these but have no idea what to search for in terms of terminology.. nor do I know if they are prohibitively expensive. Seems to me that with ultra cheap value ram you could get 8 gigs for about the same as a nice raptor raid setup... and it would smoke it.

can anyone point me in the right direction or tell me if this idea is nowhere near usable level of development yet? Thanks, been reading the forums for about 3 years now and my login disappeared somehow... not just trolling

 

[mordantmonkey]

yes they have them, yes they are expensive ~$600.

anandtech had an article in storage about one somewhere...
actually looks like it could be done with less than $500 maybe
$150 for the i-ram
$80 per gig for the memory don't know if you have to fill all four slots.

 

[alimoalem]

wow i thought i read somewhere it costs $2000 for one of the i-ram things

 

[LED]

Gigabyte I-RAM has been released but @ the price it would be more feasable to go with RAID as the review states...

 

[zkaudio]

I can't believe it's not faster than raid... seems like there is no reason to use SATA when higher xfer rates could probably be reached through a pci-e x16 slot... Why even attach it to the sata cable when it's already in a card slot?

 

[HO]

Originally posted by: zkaudio
Why even attach it to the sata cable when it's already in a card slot?

Because the SATA bus is faster than the PCI?