I have 512Meg of SDRAM lying about and I was thinking of things I could do with it. Suddenly I thought "how about making a RAM drive?", now I have no idea if this is possible and if so how. So I was wondering if you guys good gimme any input. Does any one know anywhere that sells PCB's that have RAM sockets, an IDE connection, and a bakcup battery? If so where?
Ok so the only drive I can find is CENATEK's "RocketDrive" and this costs about $1600 which is a little out of my price range(I was thinking about $30). I dont understand why it costs so much, all they need is a chip to controll the RAM and interface with the PCI port...how expanesive can that be? I mean graphics cards have RAM for gods sake.
So heres my new idea, how about making a dedicated computer then using its RAM to make the RAM drive (apparently there are programs to do this). Then I connect this computer to my main computer via a gigabit network and share the MAP the RAM drive. Voila instant RAM drive.
I RAM drive is basically a hard drive that uses RAM instead of a magnetic disk. The problem with RAM is it gets wipped when you turn off your computer, but RAM drives use battery back up or a different power supply to keep em going.
I was thinking of putting my OS on it, windows would load up increadibly fast then. I mean think about it the maximum transfer rate of a hard disk is about 50MB/sec. Even 133Mhz SDRAM can transfer at 1000MB/sec! + Hard disk access time is normally about 9ms while RAM is in the Nano seconds!
Well its not just about boot times, putting windows on a RAM drive would mean any windows programs would load instantly. Internet explorer for example.
Ok I have found another manufacturer that makes these memory boards. However I cant find anywhere that sells them.
The companies web site is <A HREF="http://www.micromemory.com/contact.html" target="_new">http://www.micromemory.com/contact.html</A> and the product I was looking at is the MM-5410D. Can anyone find somewhere that sells this?
LOL, you're completely misguided on this one: A PCI slot only transfers at a maximum 133MB/s (some say 132MB/s, depends on whether you think of PCI as 33MHz or 33.3...MHz). So Windows would probably load 2-3 times as fast (taking reduced seek times into account), not instantly. And then you consider the processing time, Windows would probably load 2x faster at most.
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Those are 64-bit 66MHz cards mostly. That's 4x the transfer rate of a standard PCI bus, but would have to be backwards compatable to the standard bus in order to work on a standard PC motherboard. So you'd still get 133MB/s instead of 533MB/s.
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Yeh I just thought about that, I would have to get a 33Mhz 32Bit PCI card. (Im assuming normal PCI slots dont support 66Mhz?) Which would pretty much cripple my performance. What about my idea of setting aside a portion of RAM on my third computer and making that a RAM drive. A Gigabit connection would still give me 133Mb/sec, but im just wondering if network latency would make the speed increases redundant.
I was thinking about doing that, but A)I dont want to leave my main system on all the time and B)I only have 512MB of RAM in my second system. Thats why I want to do it on my third system, because it uses SDRAM and I should be able to get some cheap SD off ebay.
Really wanted an add in PCI card but i cant find anything cheap.
couldn't they use pci-e or SATA interface, I would love to find one of these drives, I have found some for silly money but it doesn't seem like it should be that much? (needs mass production)
please let us know how the PC as ram drive goes as its v interesting idea
Yeh I have found 2 companies that do them, a 2GB PCI RAM drive costs £1600!!! It seems a little pricy for a PCI interface, a RAM controller and some SDRAM! I dont see how they can justify that.
ok did some lookin aswell and the term server applications and even military apps came up far too often for my wallet, tho this is the most comprehencive site i have found
I remember gaming from that huge 2mb ramdrive 