Who makes NV RAM?

[Stiganator]

I need to find a company that makes NV RAM or will make NV RAM? I am considering making a ultra high end enterprise level machine. I can't afford a cray solid state hard drive, but if I had 24 GB of NV (DDR,QDR, etc) then I could create a RAM drive and have and ultra fast machine. Does anyone make Non volitile RAM in memory modules?

 

[Eskimo]

NV RAM is more commonly referred to as Flash memory. Flash is produced by most of the major semiconductors with the largest producers being Intel, AMD, Fujitsu, STMicro, Toshiba, Micron, Samsung, and Sony. All offer various memory densities in a variety of package formats.

The access times of flash is still nowhere near that of volatile memories such as DRAM and SRAM. To my knowledge there is no such thing as non-volatile DDR or QDR memory.

 

[Evadman]

A better idea would be to use an ultra fast hard drive(s) to store data that is then loaded into the ram at startup. every so often, the hard drive can take a "picture" of the ram and save it just in case the system goes down.

 

[pm]

To expand on Eskimo's post, NV stands for "non-volatile" and refers to the fact that you can remove the power input to an NV memory and it doesn't "forget" the contents of the memory. In the past this refered to types of memory that physically didn't forget their contents like Flash and EPROM memories. Unfortunately revently the term has been confused by several manafacturers calling their SRAM/SDRAM-based memories, "NV-RAM". ST Microelectronics has a battery backed-up memory that switches over to lithium ion batteries when the power is removed. Another manufacturer uses SDRAM in combination with Flash to create a form of NVRAM in that, when the power goes away, it switches over to batteries and moves the contents of the memory over to Flash for permanent storage.

Search under Google for NVRAM and you'll find plenty of links to manufacturers.

 

[Peter]

... and if we're talking about storage, you better do use an off-the-shelf SSD (solid state disk). Quantum make these. They consist of a large array of battery backed RAM, using a standard HDD for the actual non-volatility.

regards, Peter