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So where can I buy these mythical Thunderbolt RAM modules then?

It'd be possible to make a Thunderbolt enclosure for DIMMs. For example, you could put a PCI-e RAM drive in a Thunderbolt card cage or a SATA RAM drive in a Thunderbolt SATA cage and then swap to it. In practice, no, I don't know who still makes these.

...to read this whose first thought was "Woo hoo! Big-ass RAM disk!"?

Apparently, there are SATA RAM disk assemblies out there, although apparently none that will work with DDR3 RAM (not that a quick search could find at least).

RAID (or perhaps LVM containerize) a pile of these suckers together, add in all those DIMMs, and you could have some seriously fast storage on your hands.

Practical? Probably for limited applications. Damn cool? Absolutely! It would be a like a Beowulf cluster of RAM disks...

Yaz

Really, all this is, is a non-bootable hardcard.

Remember those? They were somewhat popular in the 1980s and late 1990s... Little ISA/EISA cards with a 20 to 40mb harddisk attached?

Looked kinda like this?

To me, this is just a rehash of 20 year old technology, that has been merficully forgotten by today's generation.

If you want something a little more interesting, look at this... Or This.

Both are SATA, but are potentially user-upgradeable. The latter is deffinately more price competative per GB, AND it's bootable!

Really, all this is, is a non-bootable hardcard.

Remember those? They were somewhat popular in the 1980s and late 1990s... Little ISA/EISA cards with a 20 to 40mb harddisk attached?

Looked kinda like this?

To me, this is just a rehash of 20 year old technology, that has been merficully forgotten by today's generation.

If you want something a little more interesting, look at this... Or This.

Both are SATA, but are potentially user-upgradeable. The latter is deffinately more price competative per GB, AND it's bootable!

you obviously haven't been paying attention

ACARD ANS-9010

HyperDrive 5

come with a battery and a built-in compact flash slot so even if power is lost, it can backup to compact flash card

REAL SQL performance improvement

Get yourself an old/used hardware RAID off eBay, one that uses LVD SCSI drives, and replace the drives with cheap ATA units, equipped with SCSI-ATA bridges.

Only trick is it can be a bit challenging to mount the ATA drives in the chassis, depending on how the original drives mounted. Some arrays are nice enough to use complete trays with a separate connector, but often they'll just use basic rails and rely on the drive's SCA connector, which is bad news for this type of adaptaion

I have been using the best IDE drives I can get (usually, Maxtor with 3 year warranty / 8 meg cache / 7200 rpm) in my servers with Acard SCSI-IDE adapters. The latest adapters, such as the 7726Q, even support command queueing, and all of them support all of the other SCSI goodies like disconnection / reconnection and speeds up to 160 MB/sec. No more adding multiple PCI IDE controllers, no more cabling nightmares! They're expensive ($90 USD an adapter, usually), but worth it for applications which require good performance (like servers).

http://www.acard.com/eng/product/scside/aec-7726q. html

Even my Amiga has one; the motherboard IDE is pretty slow and can only support drives up to 128 gigs, but a 160 gig drive on the 40 MB/sec UW SCSI bus is so much faster!

Acard makes nice controllers for CD/DVD copying devices.

free PCI slots are all well and good, but if you can't find an SATA card with an mac OpenFirmware compatible BIOS, your SOL, the card is uesless..

after doing some googling i have come to the conclusion that there are exactly zero serial ATA cards that work in macs.

the situation isn't much better for parallel ATA, i can count the ATA/133 controlers that work with macs on one hand, and they are all funky hacks that pretend to be SCSI controlers! (if i look at the hardware profile of my tower, i have 3 SCSI hard drives in it, thanks to my $100 controller (it feels so nice to be a mac user, i think i need to bend over a little farther though....)

funny, my ATA controller looks like a SCSI controler!

For those not familiar, or trying to respond to others in this forum and don't know what to say: =)

IDE vs. SCSI article at PcMech.

SCSI & IDE Overview Good, informative, classroom materials for a university.

IDE to SCSI Adaptor Review of the ACard ARS-2000FW

ACARD Tech. - Makes SCSI to IDE converters.

ACard have been making a really cool range of SCSI to IDE products for several years now called SCSIDE. They work very well too, especially the mirroring and interface bridge stuff I've had my hands on :)

For more info take a look here :)

I have been using similar product for almost a year now.. from Acard Technology they are the one that produce the chipset for Addonics I think. I don't have any problem with it so far.

their cards work fine for both atapi and ide in one card, they even have cards for 50 and 68 pin, plus lvd

at memorylabs for 74$ us

macena 61.90$ us

works like a charm, and is great for when you don't want to pay the outrageous prices they charge for scsi 40x burners for your older sun system, at least that's why my roommate wanted one

I've actaully been doing a fair amount of checking on this very subject over the last few days. I'm a SCSI bigot, I have been since the Amiga days, my system is all SCSI all the time, and it's going to stay that way, thank you. (And yes, all my ten-year-old Amiga drives are still directly readable on my rig.)

However, I don't have a CD-R/RW drive yet. I do have a Plextor 40x CD-ROM drive with a Wide Ultra SCSI interface, so my first thought was to get a Plextor SCSI CD-RW drive.

Yikes! $250 for a 12x writer? I think not. Other manufacturers aren't too much better. The best deal I've found so far for native SCSI is the Yamaha CRW-F1ZS, which is a 44x drive for around $220-250.

However, if you're willing to be a little sneaky (and live on the bleeding edge), there's a company called ACard that makes an IDE-to-SCSI bridge. This little gadget slaps on the back of any IDE drive, effectively turning it into a SCSI device. They are available in wide and narrow flavors. They also have LVD flavors. The best prices I've found so far for the single-ended versions are around $70 for narrow, and $74 for wide. I haven't found any prices for the LVD versions.

For most hard drives, this is a huge win. You can easily pay $200 for a SCSI drive, and the largest size you can typically find is a paltry 18G. Subtract $70 for the IDE-SCSI bridge, and you can buy a fscking huge IDE drive for $130. However, for CD-RW drives, it doesn't put you too far ahead of the game in terms of cost. 40x IDE writers are about $150. Add $70 for the bridge, and you're back in the $220-250 range, which is what you can get a native SCSI drive for.

And there's a problem: While hard drives and CD-ROM drives are fairly standardized in terms of command packet format, CD-RW drives aren't yet. As such, ACard won't guarantee their bridge will work with the CD-RW drive of your choice, since it may require an untranslateable packet. (They've only tested against, and guarantee interoperability with, Ricoh drives.)

Hope this helps.

Schwab

I've actaully been doing a fair amount of checking on this very subject over the last few days. I'm a SCSI bigot, I have been since the Amiga days, my system is all SCSI all the time, and it's going to stay that way, thank you. (And yes, all my ten-year-old Amiga drives are still directly readable on my rig.)

However, I don't have a CD-R/RW drive yet. I do have a Plextor 40x CD-ROM drive with a Wide Ultra SCSI interface, so my first thought was to get a Plextor SCSI CD-RW drive.

Yikes! $250 for a 12x writer? I think not. Other manufacturers aren't too much better. The best deal I've found so far for native SCSI is the Yamaha CRW-F1ZS, which is a 44x drive for around $220-250.

However, if you're willing to be a little sneaky (and live on the bleeding edge), there's a company called ACard that makes an IDE-to-SCSI bridge. This little gadget slaps on the back of any IDE drive, effectively turning it into a SCSI device. They are available in wide and narrow flavors. They also have LVD flavors. The best prices I've found so far for the single-ended versions are around $70 for narrow, and $74 for wide. I haven't found any prices for the LVD versions.

For most hard drives, this is a huge win. You can easily pay $200 for a SCSI drive, and the largest size you can typically find is a paltry 18G. Subtract $70 for the IDE-SCSI bridge, and you can buy a fscking huge IDE drive for $130. However, for CD-RW drives, it doesn't put you too far ahead of the game in terms of cost. 40x IDE writers are about $150. Add $70 for the bridge, and you're back in the $220-250 range, which is what you can get a native SCSI drive for.

And there's a problem: While hard drives and CD-ROM drives are fairly standardized in terms of command packet format, CD-RW drives aren't yet. As such, ACard won't guarantee their bridge will work with the CD-RW drive of your choice, since it may require an untranslateable packet. (They've only tested against, and guarantee interoperability with, Ricoh drives.)

Hope this helps.

Schwab

I've actaully been doing a fair amount of checking on this very subject over the last few days. I'm a SCSI bigot, I have been since the Amiga days, my system is all SCSI all the time, and it's going to stay that way, thank you. (And yes, all my ten-year-old Amiga drives are still directly readable on my rig.)

However, I don't have a CD-R/RW drive yet. I do have a Plextor 40x CD-ROM drive with a Wide Ultra SCSI interface, so my first thought was to get a Plextor SCSI CD-RW drive.

Yikes! $250 for a 12x writer? I think not. Other manufacturers aren't too much better. The best deal I've found so far for native SCSI is the Yamaha CRW-F1ZS, which is a 44x drive for around $220-250.

However, if you're willing to be a little sneaky (and live on the bleeding edge), there's a company called ACard that makes an IDE-to-SCSI bridge. This little gadget slaps on the back of any IDE drive, effectively turning it into a SCSI device. They are available in wide and narrow flavors. They also have LVD flavors. The best prices I've found so far for the single-ended versions are around $70 for narrow, and $74 for wide. I haven't found any prices for the LVD versions.

For most hard drives, this is a huge win. You can easily pay $200 for a SCSI drive, and the largest size you can typically find is a paltry 18G. Subtract $70 for the IDE-SCSI bridge, and you can buy a fscking huge IDE drive for $130. However, for CD-RW drives, it doesn't put you too far ahead of the game in terms of cost. 40x IDE writers are about $150. Add $70 for the bridge, and you're back in the $220-250 range, which is what you can get a native SCSI drive for.

And there's a problem: While hard drives and CD-ROM drives are fairly standardized in terms of command packet format, CD-RW drives aren't yet. As such, ACard won't guarantee their bridge will work with the CD-RW drive of your choice, since it may require an untranslateable packet. (They've only tested against, and guarantee interoperability with, Ricoh drives.)

Hope this helps.

Schwab

Still a little expensive at US$50-$75, but better than paying full price for SCSI drive prices. Some nice benchmarks would be nice, then I just need to convince myself that I need 4xUW converters and a dual channel UW SCSI controller.

I have PC 133 in my Mac now. Oh yes, they have this wonderful card (yes I know you'd have to pay for it) called the Acard 6880-M. It ran me about 159 for the card and I bought 2 ata133 Maxtors and lemme tell you... these things are fast. I get about 160 throughput in benchmarks. Its a hardware based raid card, so it works in OS 9 and OS X perfectly. I only wish they'd fix the rom so it would sleep and spin down the disks. I have 220 gig across 4 drives and its pretty sweet. Even if they move to 133, I'd still move this card over for the RAID aspects.

You mean something like this SCSI-to-IDE bridge?
--

Yeah, true. They do make a PCI Dual Channel IDE RAID Adapter which could have the same properties as the Promise RAID adapter, ie being a simple solder away from its sibling. In that case, yes. I think that I do not know which is why I asked the question. Anyone know of other cheap ATA/66 cards which might have a solder RAID upgrade path?

How about a Beowulf cluster of these? :-)

The Acard Ultra ATA-66 PCI PnP Adapter (AEC6260) has on-board upgradable flash BIOS. Would it be possible to do the same with this card?

I wonder how the guy who did this first with the Promise card figured it out? Serendipity?

Cheap is good.