What if there was a system built...

[DeepBlue]

...that had a 60GB RAM bank that was used as the hard drive? To solve the problem of RAM requiring constant power to retain its memory you would put it in RAID 1 with another drive so that it would have a mirror. Then when you turn the computer on you work off the other drive while it is "warming up" and loading all the files on the hard drive into the RAM. Thus reducing your drive's access time to nanoseconds instead of milliseconds.

 

[Vegito]

need some internal battery backup or something incase your power supply fails, theres no way that ram drive can dump 60 gb when theres no power, ie power supply dies, big surge, brownout, etc. it would be cool, except you'll have a big machine running since 60gb of ram is like 60 stick of crucial 1gb sdram.. or something..

 

[Hender]

Well, to get 60 GB of RAM you'd have to have a pretty custom setup, and you couldn't use any of the RAM that's available through standard retail channels unless anyone knows of a server system that has a memory riser card with 120 DIMM slots? Didn't think so.

Theoretically it's possible to do, but as I said, you would have to have a pretty custom setup. I don't think there are any commerically available technologies that would allow you to do this, but it's a future possibility.

 

[ProviaFan]

Now that would be cool to have. I want one! 🙂

 

[bigshooter]

Really you would just need a couple of gigs. You don't need to store 60 gigs of mp3z and porno movies in ram. The access time is negligble on a regular hard drive. You would just need to have any resource intensive proggy liek games in ram as well as the OS.

 

[Diffusion]

This is commonly done. However, it tends to be extremely expensive, as you typically get an external SCSI enclosure with custom boards, and 1gb DIMMs are rather expensive (800-1200$). The RAID 1 is also done, you achieve really fast speeds, due to all the custom hardware however, and the small market, they retail for around 25000$ each (when I checked a few months ago). Dirtcheapdrives.com sold a couple, I think they ranged up to a half dozen gigs or so.