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

awwwyeah!

[agramata]

FP!

I'm Wet

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you change me?

Re:Power loss?

[Ace905]

You got that right! Eggplants!

Just check this out for example....

Ace905

Cheap, but no imagination

[sane?]

Sure memory is cheap. So is hard disk space, processor power and just about everything else we used to lust after.

Problem is, even though just about everything is at least an order of magnitude, well MORE, than it was 5 years ago; we are STILL just doing the same old things with it.

Granted we now have MP3 players and Tivos; but where are the dramatically different day-to-day machines. Why is it I'm still stuck in front of a machine which at heart isn't much different to the old PC XT?

Is it going to roll around to 2030 and I'll be sitting in front of a 2,000,000 GHz Pentium X with 16,000 Gb memory and a 1000 Tb - and still be trying to get Microsoft Word to deal with a document bigger than 10 pages ?

When do we get a step change in the underlying structure? When do we start using this massive power for something more impressive than spinning a chart in a Powerpoint presentation ?

Where is the brave new future?

Re:Feline Poop

[Anonymous Coward]

You ain't very erudite, I'm the anonymous LambdaMOO basher. I've been getting FP's regularly for years, and have no need to claim them any further.

What are you, some sort of hypocrite like mackga?

Damn troll

[Anonymous Coward]

From western-digital.com I can get a 40GB 7200RPM UATA/100 caviar harddrive for $117.00. That's 341.88MB per dollar.

Funny, from western-digital.com all I can get is "agency natasha digital cyber friends online catalog of russian women. dating.servicelivenow- online personals and profiles. arabic dating digital cyber friends for mostly middle eastern men and women to place ads. romantics network digital cyber friends features a directory of matchmaking sites, free chat, postcards, advice, backgroundsets, ideas, and more."

Re:Huh?

[aonifer]

From western-digital.com I can get a 40GB 7200RPM UATA/100 caviar harddrive for $117.00. That's 341.88MB per dollar.

Yes, but those are dog MB.

Re:I'm puzzled.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's quite simple, actually. Mackga would troll and first post away, happily doing it as an anonymous coward. One day he forgot to check off 'post anonymously', and was outed. It was pretty obvious too, an early troll with a +2 bonus in a well-read article.... from a UID of three digits.

Needless to say, he was outed soon after that, and became a logged in troll. Many months passed, and then he began his crusade against AC's. Kind of hypocritical, if you ask me.

Reminds me of redneck anti-semites attacking Jews, yelling at them for killing Jesus when their supposed lord and savior was a Jew himself. Mackga blasting people for doing what he himself has been doing for some time seems quite rediculous.

And fuck LambdaMOOers.

Re:Huh? [OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time we create a new slashdot!!! using gpl'ed slashcode!!!

By the way...

suppose a = b,
(a - b)^2 = aa - bb
(a - b)^2 = ab - bb
(a - b)^2 = (a - b)b
(a - b) = b
a = 2b
1 = 2

1 = 2, 2 = 4, ... 1 = 100. Therefore, (\there4) Timothy's calculations were correct!!