PCI Ram Drive Card

[zeradul]

I want one !

They had one on the Screensavers about a year ago... but they never mentioned the manufacturer...

Its just a card that you install that has angled slots that you can install DIMM ram in, and use it as a VERY fast drive... Anyone know of a maker/retailer?

[Thoric]

i saw one a long time ago in a PC User magazine. it had 8 slots and could hold up to 4 gb of ram, but was very expensive. $2000 or something if i remember and only included 1gb of ram.

maybe you'll have some old PC user magazines lying around, it was around the 2000 somewhere...good luck :thumb: :thumb:

[DigitalDD]

or you could buy a solid state hard disk for around the same price. it would probably be just as fast..

[zeradul]

Except, doesn't a PCI slot outperform a IDE channel by alot?

None the less, who makes them?

[DigitalDD]

Just do a search for SSD [Solid State Disks] you should find a bunch of vendors.

its not something you'llfind on pricewatch.:eek:

[Albinus]

Quantum (yes the company who sold their HDD division to Maxtor) have one of the most experienced teams of engineers in Solid State storage - try their website and see what you come up with ;)

[Yegolev]

I wanted one too, until I saw this:

$3 per MB

Now I want to make a tiny ramdrive using system RAM. But not really.

[zeradul]

Its just a card that you install that has angled slots that you can install DIMM ram in, and use it as a VERY fast drive...

The One I saw was just a PCI card, that you could install ANY DIMM ram in, and it had 4 slots.... so (4) 128MB PC66 meg DIMM's = 100$ for a half gig of insanly fast access space.

edit: I would think that there would be a significant market for these, they're cheap, fast and this type of thing IS done in specially made web servers, so they must exist somewhere.

[Andy]

they are cheap and fast, but do they hold data when the machine is off? if not, each time you turn the machine on, you will have to copy back the data you want to use at the super fast speeds.

[Yegolev]

The $3-per-MB solid-state drives do keep data when the machine loses power, which is probably why they cost so much since they use NVRAM or some such rather than something SDRAM.

If anybody gets a lead on one of the PCI ones, let me know. Ultimate geekage. I wouldn't mind having to copy stuff to it to run at those speeds.

[zeradul]

but do they hold data when the machine is off

Yes, they have their own AC adapter.

The -per-MB solid-state drives do keep data when the machine loses power, which is probably why they cost so much since they use NVRAM or some such rather than something SDRAM.

Yea... hmm... I would be very willing to sacrifice that feature just to bring it into my price range... so I still think it must exist. I mean look at all the people willing to mess with RAID 0 setups to only achieve a slight increase in access speed. A ram drive like I hope exists would absolutely rape a RAID 0 configuration in all aspects, apart from size. And yea, it would take some messing around with, but just imagine, for 250$, you could have a GIG drive able to perform at the limitations of your PCI slot!!!