Why Not Solid State Hard Drives?

I never quite thought I'd see this in my life time, but RAM is now cheaper when it comes to memory-per-unitofcurrency than hard drives. Of course, those of you who have noticed this have also wondered, quite reasonably, that it might be cheaper to start building Solid State Hard Drives entirely out of RAM, rather than using the standard ole platters. Is there anyone in the market who also has noticed this and is attempting to market a product that will fill this need? Remember this puppy from 2 years ago, and this story, mentioned a year ago? While the first one was a bit of a laugh, the second article does mention a limit to the lifetime of the current MO Hard Drives. Are we closing in on that limit, now? Update: 10/11 2a EDT by C :I apologize for not catching the erroneous statement above, earlier. What I had meant to say was that since RAM is at its cheapest point in price in recent years, not to say that it was cheaper per-unit-of-currency, which is absolutely false. Chalk this one up to too much creative writing in college, lack of sleep, and a long frustrating day. Thanks to brian@pongonova.net for pointing out that error.

waterlogged asks: "I was just wondering if anybody has heard of a cheap ram based network drive? Seems to me with the ram prices being at about US. $12.00 for 128 megs that someone hasn't developed a battery backup version of this to plug into a network or even a bus. A gig worth of 8ns seek time storage for $120 anyone? That would just about eliminate any wait in loading programs."

BigSlowTarget asks: "There are some previous articles on Slashdot about vendors selling solid state drives, but they all seem to be quite expensive - particularly given the slide in the cost of memory. Has anyone hacked together a solid state drive to take advantage of $60/GB memory prices? I'd really like to be able to boot and run at solid state speed without spending thousands."

Jah-Wren Ryel asks: "In case you haven't noticed, RAM is incredibly cheap, you can put a gigabyte of PC133 RAM into your machine for less than $60. A year ago, that would have cost more like $600. So now it is feasible for one to have a 10-15GB RAM disk, except for one thing - most motherboards won't support more than 2GB total (4 dimm slots x 512MB per dimm). It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to design a PCI card to hold 20-30 dimms and make that available through a hardware windowing scheme (like EMS/EMM back in the old 16-bit days). With the right drivers it could be used as a big RAM disk or for buffercache. Is there such a product out there? The closest I have seen are solid-state disks that sit on the other end of a scsi bus, are too expensive, and aren't anywhere near as fast as a PCI implementation could be."

So what technical details (and the issues of volatile data and price) may be preventing the construction of RAM based drives, and is there anything else that may be preventing some entrepreneurial soul from bringing such a thing to market?

Comments

A long time coming

[Slashdolt]

I've been saying this for years. Eventually, we need to scrap the spinning platters. Unless I have a butt-load of MP3's and other things I don't really need, I can easily fit most of my stuff into 4GB or less.

Re:Needs constant power

[Another MacHack]

If only there were some sort of device which could store electrical power for later use.

Re:Needs constant power

[uchian]

You mean a battery?

Or was that a joke and I missed it?

The illegal use potential

[thryllkill]

L337 script kiddies would no longer have to worry about their Hard Drives telling the tale of all of their l337 ownz3r!ngs. As soon as the feds show up yank the plug.

This would also work for War3z fiends. *again, yanks plug* "What do you mean piracy, I don't even have an OS on there."

Seriously, I think it would only be useful if you could couple it with a RAID-like (I know it wouldn't be true RAID) system so if the power for whatever reason (Power outage, UPS goes bad, battery dies) you info wuold still be there, maybe a RAM-drive that does nightly/hourly back ups...

640k

[krelian]

"640k is enough for everybody" (or something like it) Memories...(I want to hear you all singing)

RAM is for wimps!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for a nice 80GB EEPROM to store data on.

R-A-I-D or R-A-I-D ?

[green pizza]

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

or

Redundant Array of Inexpensive DIMMs

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fool! All you have done is made everyone agree that your comment is worthy of being moderated up! You need to actually tell the moderators what to do, like this:

This comment will be ranked +3, Funny.

Re:How about integrated buffers?

[arglesnaf]

I can't believe this was modded interesting. (Not because the poster didn't know, but that the moderator got away with it as well) (Then again I only knew this from an OS design course I took... =))

Don't we sync disks in Linux/BSD/Unix before shutting down or unmounting a disk to flush the buffers?

There is even an NT resource kit utility that causes these buffers to be flushed as well.

The AT&T System V manuals describe a table to indicate what was in the buffers to insure files didn't get out of sync.

Welcome to the technology of the late 70's... =)

Re:RAM Drives.

[SubtleNuance]

What about running the device over USB or IEE1394?

Re:Huh? [OT]

[SnoopDobb]

obviously the slashdot staff has been replaced by a beowulf cluster of monkeys