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Actually they've had "ram drives" for some time now - http://www.cenatek.com/ - is one company which makes them. I am sure there are others, but this would be the coolest.

Yeah, I hear that. When I first heard about Gigabyte's I-RAM peripheral I was really excited, until I found out that it used the SATA bus which is a huge bottleneck for such a device. A company called Cenatek makes something known as the RocketDrive which is actually a PCI card which interfaces via the PCI bus for 0.6 microsecond access times. It is, however, $3,000 for one with 4GB of RAM on it. They're just regular DIMMs, too (PC133 IIRC) so I can't see why it's so damn expensive. They used to sell just the bare card, but they stopped doing so a year or two ago (probably because everybody bought the bare card and put their own DIMMs in it, and their profit margin on the bare cards was not high enough). When I first heard about the I-RAM, I thought it was going to be extra-spiffy like the RocketDrive.

Yeah, I hear that. When I first heard about Gigabyte's I-RAM peripheral I was really excited, until I found out that it used the SATA bus which is a huge bottleneck for such a device. A company called Cenatek makes something known as the RocketDrive which is actually a PCI card which interfaces via the PCI bus for 0.6 microsecond access times. It is, however, $3,000 for one with 4GB of RAM on it. They're just regular DIMMs, too (PC133 IIRC) so I can't see why it's so damn expensive. They used to sell just the bare card, but they stopped doing so a year or two ago (probably because everybody bought the bare card and put their own DIMMs in it, and their profit margin on the bare cards was not high enough). When I first heard about the I-RAM, I thought it was going to be extra-spiffy like the RocketDrive.

"This sounds like a perfect candidate for a swap partion, especially on Windows. Windows swap is a huge performance hog." - by Twillerror (536681) on Wednesday January 25, @10:58AM

Yes it is, & I have been doing EXACTLY that (pagefile.sys placement on its own partition to avoid fragging other files & itself), for 4 years now, on a CENATEK "RocketDrive", (a similar device to the one cited in this article)...

It works wonders, FAR faster access & seek time to data, & overall speed of the OS + apps!

Fact is, I wrote an article about this theoretical use (& others not just theory but practical uses) of them in the mid 90's for EEC systems, now called SuperSpeed.com...

(They are the maker of SuperDisk, a mirroring back to backing hdd software-based ramdrive solution, but the constraints of using it for a pagefile.sys housing is that you have MORE than 4gb online (4gb limit per process (2gb process/2gb OS use for mgt. of it in Windows NT-based modern OS (2000/XP/Server 2003) 32-bit systems not using the /3gb boot.ini switch)))

Then, the same basic article & ideas (plus tests also) later on for CENATEK itself (since I wanted to check this type of hardware), & it is featured on their webpage:

http://www.cenatek.com/

See "An Independent User's Review of CENATEK's Rocket Drive" there on their homepage, it goes into it... & more + tests & results.

I have a 2gb solid-state drive via the RocketDrive (in RAM of its own onboard the PCI card) with 1gb as the pagefile.sys area, & the other 1gb as these value areas:

GOOD USES OF RAMDISKS, ESPECIALLY SOLID-STATE ONES, FOR BOTH HOME USERS AND INDUSTRIAL USE:

1.) %TEMP%/%TMP$% environmental variable values on it, so that temp ops in apps take place there (assuming since they all get a copy of the systemwide environment data structure, they use it, like an "in memory .ini file" to reference - & when they have tunable internal parameters (like WinZip &/or WinRar do for example, I set it in the app itself))

2.) Logging operations from apps & the OS itself (e.g. - the FILE value for EventLogs of all kinds) also occurs there & faster than it would on std. electro-mechanical HDD's...

3.) Lastly, things like webpage caching, history, & cookies placement occur here on it as well for the fastest possible access/reaccess to them as well (& so they do NOT clutter up the other files on the HDD's here, slowing things down even more...

4.) Running certain processes from it, like SETI@Home (boinc client folder in its entirety, & my output's incredible, "RAC" outpaces entire FARMS of systems, even faster than my own per-system-wise (RAC depends on factors like time you put into it also though, but the disk I/O occuring on this type of drive has to help as well, the results show that much).

5.) LASTLY - Folks into websites &/or database driven websites & DB Engines might wish to take note of these units as well... they can help TREMENDOUSLY there as well, & nowadays these units have backing power supplies as well (couple that with a UPS, you have data safety in the event of power outage as well)...

* :)

They're great stuff, IF you use them right! The value's NOT in the throughput really (the card bus you use, be it PCI or PCI Express even & SATA emulation has limits, far less than the memory used itself) but in the ACCESS/SEEK times for file I/O... think of it from that viewpoint when you go to apply these things, & you gain...

APK

I believe that's just a normal ramdrive - they've been around forever with software emulation. Of course, the advantage of a hardware add-on is that, otherwise, you have to part with a portion of your system ram to make it into a ramdrive and of course, it was not always economical to add more ram (limited # of slots or too expensive for a huge single stick of ram) - the PCI card effectively just doubles the number of ram slots you have.....

Cenatek also has a Solid State Disk hardware solution available for a long time:
http://www.cenatek.com/

But it's always been ridiculously expensive to me for what basically is ram on a PCI board.

A ramdisk is very nice for any files (or a shitload of small files) that get read and written to a lot but don't get loaded into system memory for some reason. I used to use a software one (emulated another drive as "G:\" back when I used Windows) and pointed my browser there for it's cache folder into it - speeded up the whole surfing experience with already visited webpages...

"When o when will we have solid state long time memory in our computers without moving parts?" - by miffo.swe (547642) on Thursday November 24, @04:16PM

Go here:

http://www.cenatek.com/

I did the "Independent User's Review" on the front page of their website, other reviews are within the events/press pages so you can see others' findings as well as my own in various usage scenarios.

* :)

They cost a bit, but less than other solutions for what you're looking for per your comment.

(They're already here, & they work great + last (had mine for @ least 2-3 years now))

They're outstanding, especially for diskbound processes. Makes sense, there's no mechanical parts movement latencies & running in RAM totally as to whatever you deem to see fit to run from one.

E.G.-> I place my pagefile.sys onto the first half of mine (2gb total RAM onboard, in 2 x 1gb partitions)

2nd half/partition of it is %temp% environment ops for OS & app, webpage caching, & %comspec% environment ops (cmd.exe).

And, I run my SETI@Home units from it as well!

(Currently I am @ 3 hrs 13min 5 sec each avg. processing time per unit - that's PRETTY quick, considering again, that I did my first 50 units on an OLD system that took 24 hrs. per unit, & later on one that only took that down to roughly 7 hours per unit)

Using this ramdrive solid-state ramdisk card this way has helped me cut my SETI@Home processing times into less than 1/2 from 7 hrs per unit, literally!

(Well, that & faster CPU's of course + faster motherboard &/or RAM technologies of today in the mix as well)

I.E.-> I did my first 50 units back in 1999 on an AMD K6-III @ 450mhz cpu system w/ much slower RAM & mobo technology as well - that took 24 hrs. per unit!

Later, a Pentium III Dual/SMP 1ghz (each CPU) + PC-133 SDRAM unit only managed to take that down to 6 hrs. 58 min. using the RocketDrive.

My latest rig Pentium 4 3.2ghz + DDR Ram & this RocketDrive took it to the figure above (currently @ 3 hr. 13 min. 5 sec. & decreasing still at 1.5-2 sec per unit processed)).

Yes, you can use them on LINUX also, not just Windows NT-based OS (NT/2000/XP/Server 2003), before anyone inquires on that or yells & screams about that as well.

APK

P.S.=> You can't boot your OS from it (yet), but other than that?

They're there & they work for speeding things up quite a bit & can be striped/spanned into a single large 16gb "disk" (4x 4gb maximum memory configuration per-each-ramdisk board) based on PC-133 SDRAM!

So, if you have diskbound processing you want sped up, these can help & exist already (for years now in fact, I have had mine since iirc, 2002-2003)... apk

"The Rocketdrives are rather poor" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06, @12:15PM

I dunno, I like mine alot! I use 1/2 as my pagefile (1st partition) & 1/2 as my temp/swap area for apps & the OS, @ least for my home system.

I got mine on a HEAVY discount, I wrote up a review for them is why. Only downside I noted? COST!

http://www.cenatek.com/

" An Independent User's Review of CENATEK's Rocket Drive"

(Mine was along with many others, including Windows IT Pro mag, & they knew who I was, since I wrote a competing ramdrive product YEARS ago based off MS' DDK driver template... nice part? I got "front page of their site" status, even over Windows IT Pro mag's review & others from this page:)

http://www.cenatek.com/press.cfm

The nicest part, other than that front page status on their site & getting mine @ 1/3rd the std. cost? Was I got a great product & love having it! Nothing touches it for speed of access & putting my pagefile.sys into RAM, literally?

FLIES!

(As well as temp ops of ALL kinds from %System/User Environment vars% in the System Control Panel applet section on performance tuning in Windows NT-based OS flying too!)

Other than that high cost for typical buyers (which I was not subject to for writing that review), I found nothing but GOOD things to say about it.

"they've been out-innovated by Gigabyte" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06, @12:15PM

BUT, not by even 15k rpm diskdrives from the UltraScSi world & my init. point here in reply, point-blank!

About being "out-innovated"? It happens - natural fact in this, or any, industry. I've seen buildings in various companies where they pull apart a competitors work (reverse engineering) & steal its ideas, & do it better/faster/cheaper... not TOO hard to do, once you have a template to work on (the other guys work) & to start from!

It happens in software like mad (I am a software engineer for work typically the last decade/decade ++ now) & also in the world of hardware.

Anyhow - on the init. topic? Nothing can touch solid-state disks for access times & latency... nothing from the std. world of mechanical diskdrives (even the fastest 15k rpm diskdrives from the UltraScSi world).

Point-blank/fact.

APK

"The Rocketdrives are rather poor" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06, @12:15PM

I dunno, I like mine alot! I use 1/2 as my pagefile (1st partition) & 1/2 as my temp/swap area for apps & the OS, @ least for my home system.

I got mine on a HEAVY discount, I wrote up a review for them is why. Only downside I noted? COST!

http://www.cenatek.com/

" An Independent User's Review of CENATEK's Rocket Drive"

(Mine was along with many others, including Windows IT Pro mag, & they knew who I was, since I wrote a competing ramdrive product YEARS ago based off MS' DDK driver template... nice part? I got "front page of their site" status, even over Windows IT Pro mag's review & others from this page:)

http://www.cenatek.com/press.cfm

The nicest part, other than that front page status on their site & getting mine @ 1/3rd the std. cost? Was I got a great product & love having it! Nothing touches it for speed of access & putting my pagefile.sys into RAM, literally?

FLIES!

(As well as temp ops of ALL kinds from %System/User Environment vars% in the System Control Panel applet section on performance tuning in Windows NT-based OS flying too!)

Other than that high cost for typical buyers (which I was not subject to for writing that review), I found nothing but GOOD things to say about it.

"they've been out-innovated by Gigabyte" - by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06, @12:15PM

BUT, not by even 15k rpm diskdrives from the UltraScSi world & my init. point here in reply, point-blank!

About being "out-innovated"? It happens - natural fact in this, or any, industry. I've seen buildings in various companies where they pull apart a competitors work (reverse engineering) & steal its ideas, & do it better/faster/cheaper... not TOO hard to do, once you have a template to work on (the other guys work) & to start from!

It happens in software like mad (I am a software engineer for work typically the last decade/decade ++ now) & also in the world of hardware.

Anyhow - on the init. topic? Nothing can touch solid-state disks for access times & latency... nothing from the std. world of mechanical diskdrives (even the fastest 15k rpm diskdrives from the UltraScSi world).

Point-blank/fact.

APK

"If you need low latency, you need high-RPM drives and no amount of RAID will help you" - by drsmithy (35869) on Saturday November 05, @06:58PM

Oh, really? You're jumping the gun, & overlooking the Solid-State Drive world...

For instance - Do you know that CENATEK RocketDrives can be spanned into a single large 16gb unit (4x4gb each), & their access times &/or latency is FAR lower than ANYTHING even the UltraScSi 15k rpm world (even in RAID) can produce??

Look into them:

http://www.cenatek.com/

I could see using this for DB work, especially temp tables work (if your actual table are WAY too large for 16gb that is, & some are), &/or if your tables don't exceed near to 16gb size.

(And, yes, they have backing powersupplies, which you can additionally supplement with UPS's)

APK

P.S.=> Are there larger models than 4gb each out there in the Solid State drive world? Probably!

I just am not currently aware of them, but they probably are out there... & I do not look into that possibility myself, but consider the fact you may be overlooking them when you made your statement here above is all... apk

I'm VERY surprised that no one has seen that this is NOT a new product. The CENATEK Rocket Drive has been around since 2001...

And it has it's own battery backup as well.

In addition, all Rocket Drives have multiple integrated power sources: an external DC input, power from the host bus or onboard UPS.

It's even been featured on ScreenSavers (TechTV) in '01. Here are it's press releases.

I'm VERY surprised that no one has seen that this is NOT a new product. The CENATEK Rocket Drive has been around since 2001...

And it has it's own battery backup as well.

In addition, all Rocket Drives have multiple integrated power sources: an external DC input, power from the host bus or onboard UPS.

It's even been featured on ScreenSavers (TechTV) in '01. Here are it's press releases.

>> 1.) Faster HD access (the real limiting factor in PC computing these days)

I'd _really_ like to see solid state drives come down in price and go up in size. The current choices are really cool, but not quite ready for prime time....

The "ramdisk" is not needed. Simply purchase one or more Rocket Drive Solid State Disk PCI drives from CENATEK: http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm They sell them on e-bay for just a couple of grand in 2GB and 4GB sizes: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =5181816376&category=167&sspagename=rvi:1:1v_home

http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm

I seem to remember that reviews of this thing said it was good, but pricey, and had firmware locked to the ram config you bought it with, making upgrades expensive.... You can't just buy an empty one and fill it. (All IIRC though.)

Similar devices have been around for decades, and they've always been insanely overpriced. How hard could it be to put a memory controller (SDR SDRAM, or even EDO or FPM) and a SCSI controller in a drive-sized box with a bunch of memory slots? I don't know, but I first asked that question on Usenet in 1995 and never got a useful answer.

Ah, perhaps you should google around a bit first:

From this review:

Compatibility*: The Rocket DriveTM supports the following operating systems:

* Microsoft® Windows® 2000, XP and NT 4.
* Red Hat Linux® 7.3
* Free BSD®
* Solaris® 8/UltraSPARC II

Under Development: MAC® OS X; HP-UX®; AIX®; MS-DOS®; and Microsoft Windows 98, Millennium Edition

And judging by some of their press releases from a few years ago, the company realizes that their potential clients for something like this run Linux and BSD servers.

Do you mean the Cenatec Rocket Drive?

I believe you seek one of these Speed is limited mostly by the PCI bus..

Cenatek pci ram disks

BitMicro

M-Systems

You could probably find one for normal sdram, but to find a device that goes from 40/80pin ide to laptop SO-DIMMS is going to be a challenge.

http://www.hyperos2002.com/07042003/products.htm

HyperOs HyperDrive III, 16GB capacity, ATA100, rather pricey.

http://www.cenatek.com/

Cenatek Rocket Drive, various product versions, PCI instead.

If you're working with small files (1 GB) have you considered Solid State? Or something like this: Rocket Drive 4 GB memory on a PCI card, mounted as a file system - 3000$ US.

The infamous RocketDrive RocketDrive.

Or you can use Flash drives, less expensive but a bit slower.

Actually I have been thinking about solid state drives for quite some time now. Here's what I came up with the last iteration :

You are pretty much just as well off with a nice tight SATA RAID 5 array. Tom's ran a recent article on throughput for SATA RAID 5 arrays and found that at 6 drives (using those bad ass high end Raptors, I'm guessing) he could break through the 200 megabytes per second sustained transfer rates. About 4-5 times what you and I get on a daily basis from our regular ATA-100 hard drive (which was to be expected, given the number of drives in the array.) A single person on a single machine doing single (or simple multi) tasking isn't going to notice much difference in performance between that and a RAM drive. Some, yes, but almost negligible. The only way the additional performance gains from RAM make sense is multiple users doing radically different things - this would have the drive array thrashing around trying to do all those different things but RAM seek times are effectively zero.

You really wouldn't get the incredible boost in performance you are imagining, simply because hard drives are already pretty fast and approaching the point where they are no longer the bottleneck.

Look here for a review from a little over a year ago. He got all excited about the differences he saw, but in reality many applications didn't show a noticable difference.

Don't get me wrong - I am going to keep trying, as this is a never ending quest ... but solid state drives aren't the holy grail of computing.

If you want to experiment with solid state drives, check out Cenatek's Ramdisk. Cost you $69 (they may have a free timed demo, I'm not entirely sure) and you can use it to convert your system RAM to a Ramdrive = solid state disk. If you like what it does, just throw more memory in your computer and go for it. If you can find a way to really speed up your system, be sure to share it with the rest of us ($69 is dirt cheap if you can figure out a way to get a 20% boost in performance - but you would need a bunch of RAM to take advantage of it.

I think I didnt get my point across...or missread the reply...anyhow what I was talking about was PCI cards that used DIMMs to make a physical drive with RAM thus allowing a swap drive that is as fast (or close anyhow) to the speed of the memory rather than the speed of a hard drive. See cards such as the rocket drive for reference to what I mean.

An old, surplus, dedicated swap drive on its own channel: $0.00

A RAMdrive from system memory: Under $100

A solid state disk drive you shove into a PCI slot with a bunch of SDRAM on it: Priceless

For everything else, there's, Hey! Why would I pay more than a grand for a PCI bandwidth capped solid state drive when I can fill my memory slots and use RAMDrive at DDR bandwidth?

An old, surplus, dedicated swap drive on its own channel: $0.00

A RAMdrive from system memory: Under $100

A solid state disk drive you shove into a PCI slot with a bunch of SDRAM on it: Priceless

For everything else, there's, Hey! Why would I pay more than a grand for a PCI bandwidth capped solid state drive when I can fill my memory slots and use RAMDrive at DDR bandwidth?

It looks like their software does not require their hardware. You can create virtual drives on your RAM, without needing the Rocket Drive hardware.

RocketDrive retails for $1000 with 1GB to $3000 with 4GB. Not exactly "on the cheap" though. They used to sell it without memory, but apparently they don't anymore. Here's a review.

RocketDrive retails for $1000 with 1GB to $3000 with 4GB. Not exactly "on the cheap" though. They used to sell it without memory, but apparently they don't anymore. Here's a review.

I believe you're looking for a RocketDrive.

I believe it's a 33 MHz PCI beastie.

What characteristics do you want? There are two major types of solid state drives -- battery-backed ram, and flash ram. Both are expensive and small. Only one is fast.

My requirements were essentially (1) no moving parts, (2) affordable if not cheap, and (3) small. I settles on one of these. Debian is fine on 128MB, with 512MB of ram and no swap. Performance, it should be said, sucks. The next step up, for slightly more performance, much more capacity, and a whole lot more cost, is here; but I wanted to avoid using a case that needed drive bays, plus I haven't pockets that deep.

Neither of those is likely to be what you want for a database system, though. You're probably more in the market for a bunch of ram and a battery, unless your primary concern is reliability. If speed is the goal, you want this, or, for more capacity and more money, this. Note that I haven't used either extensively, and in playing around with the rocket a little, I was surprised just how much of a bottleneck PCI became. Also, the rocket doesn't have a battery... so really, unless you have a board with 8GB of memory, and you just need another 8GB of low latency space, it's not such a great deal today.

If you fit into any of the niches above, solid state is wonderful. It's always more expensive than you think, though. And for any database systems I've dealt with, a disk is without question the way to go, perhaps with more memory on board. But if you want any further tips, I'm glad to help.

Use this link to check out the Cenatek solidstate drives, now upto 4gb!

Windows loser talk.

If you only knew about tempfs and other unix style strategies that help to avoid hitting swap (solaris uses unused memory in place of /tmp being on a disk).

What should they do, AlphaSys? Make a RAMdisk on one of these and put the "pagefile" on it?

The the problem with you is you never get technical nor offer any solutions or say anything of interest.

When you look at something like this, it makes $5000 for 20GB seem like a conservative estimate.

..one or two of these
Briefly said: Kicks any RAID (SCSI or not) and your RAMdisk solution up and down the street.
It could be a tad pricey though, as you might wanna suspect. :-)

Buy the RAM and use it with a few of these solid state disks. 4GB per PCI slot. But don't be disappointed if it still isn't as fast as you want it to be: The disks are probably not the bottleneck. I'd be surprised if a properly configured RAID array couldn't deliver adequate performance for video editing. Even single disks are fast enough to work with uncompressed video these days.

Did anyone think in terms of *real* solutions, rather than just pricing out parts and assuming this guy could magically make them work together?

Anyway, at least one solution to this request appeared on Slashdot just a few days ago: The solid-state RocketDrive.

Perhaps not the ideal solution (I honestly can't say if OEM solid-state storage exists on a much bigger scale), but something that you can concretely say "this would work". Proof-of-concept, if nothing else.

Granted, for the size you want, at $5k/4G, This would cost USD $1.3 billion just for the storage itself (not counting the array of 32k+ PCI slots you'd need to hold all these and the hellacious network to RAID them), but this sounds like a gub'mint project anyway, so cost presumeably forms the *last* of your concerns. If cost *does* matter, you can get the unpopulated controller boards for $800 each, and certainly a *much* better bulk deal on RAM then what Cenatek offers (basically they charge $1k/1G? Perhaps 10 years ago!).

Checking Pricewatch, the average non-volume-buyer can get 1G of PC133 for around $100). That would lower the storage-only cost to only USD $315 million, before considering volume discounts.

This is the one I've used most, but it's not free. While googling for where I found it I also stumbled on this website, but I have no personal experience with that one.

The official website lists the capacity as 4 GB.

>Are there any PCI cards on the market that are made just for this purpose? e.g. not a video card, but just a PCI card with DDR or DIMM banks and maybe a controller (not talking about those cpu/dimm pci machine on a card setups).

Yes, there is a PCI Card that acts as an Solid State IDE Disk: http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm

From their website
well isnt *this* nice .. has anyone ever actually seen one of these? or is it just vaporware?

Rocket Drive(TM) Solid State Disk

In September 2001, Cenatek will debut the Rocket Drive(TM) SSD, the company's flagship hardware product. The Rocket Drive delivers the fastest access times of any storage device available. Utilizing standard Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), the Rocket Drive achieves its price/performance advantages through use of an innovative PCI bus-attached form factor that is vastly different than conventional, channel-attached SSD devices.

Cenatek may make exactly what you're looking for. It's a PCI card, and uses standard SDRAM sticks.

From their site:
The Rocket Drive stores data in memory modules (standard dynamic random access memory, or DRAM) rather than on magnetic media.

(heh. oops.)

Cenatek seems to be on a good track with these. They offer a PCI card with a handful of DIMM slots, a slap on rechargable battery panel, which holds enough power to run a connected hard drive of appropriate size which will dump the contents of what is essentially a RAM disk, in the event of a shutdown or power loss. A little spendy still, for consumer use, but to see something like this backend busy websites, or store database file structures would be pretty slick.