Hard Drive of the Future: Ram Drive

benzick writes "3d Retreat has posted a hands on look at a 2gig ram drive called the Rocket Drive. Article blurb: Overall the rocket drive is the best in I/O performance I have seen. It outperforms U160 SCSI drives by almost a factor of two. Yet there are some drawbacks to the Rocket drive, foremost is the price, although listed at the end of the review is some alternative pricing options to make it less expensive. And the rocket drive can not act as a boot drive. Also, if you have some extra money to spend, you can use multiple rocket drives in parallel."

Comments

Re:x10^2?!

[mstyne]

For that price, I'll wait the extra 7 seconds for Mozilla to load, thankyouverymuch.

Re:What's the point?

[Mage Powers]

>What's the point of this?
You must not be a geek if you need to ever ask that.
>You can already create RAM drives using the memory you have in your machine. You don't need a dedicated unit to do it.
Yes you can, but can you plug those ram drives into a UPS and keep the contents between reboots?
>Heck, I could create meagre RAM drives on my 640KB Amstrad PC1640 (8086).
So?

>Why not just fit your PC out with 4GB of fast DDR RAM and do it that way? That memory would be far cheaper than this card.
What if I want 4gigs of ram AND a ramdrive? I don't, one gig of ram is enough...

Personally I don't get why people always expect products to have a really necessary use ;)

Can I use it for swap?

[Thalia]

Makes me wonder if I can use for my swap drive;

1. The OS wants to store something in RAM, trys to allocate RAM and fails.
2. The OS decides to swap out some memory based on an analysis of page usage statistics, so it grabs the handle to the swap file.
3. Then, the OS streams the offending pages through file I/O subsystem, worrying about waits and updating page counters and such. This includes dragging all the data over a busy system bus.
4. The receiving device stores it in RAM.

Cool! What operating system could aspire to such levels of efficiency?

The future that already was

[jasonditz]

That's great, but am I the only one who remembers having RAMdisks on my Atari 800?

Axlon used to make 128 KB Ramdisks, now that was power!

Re:The future that already was

[FleshWound]

That's great, but am I the only one who remembers having RAMdisks on my Atari 800?

You probably are the only one who remembers anything about your Atari 800. =)

Some people can't afford ($) not to reboot

[yerricde]

Anyway, how often do people reboot their machines nowadays?

I'll answer the related question, "why would anybody need to reboot a computer?"

Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to live and work in an environment that primarily uses BSD or Linux. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, live and work in an environment that primarily uses Microsoft Windows. Therefore, I have to use Microsoft Windows.

Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to be able to afford personal copies of PC virtualization software such as VMware, so that they can run other operating systems within a window on their computer. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, can't afford a VMware license. Therefore, I must run Microsoft Windows on the bare hardware, and if I want to run an operating system other than Microsoft Windows, I must reboot my computer to access it.

Some slashdot readers are lucky enough to be able to afford to buy additional hardware to shield their other computer from exploits of newly discovered vulnerabilities in its operating system. But unlike some slashdot readers, I, Damian Yerrick, can't afford a second motherboard, CPU, case, and keyboard on which to run BSD firewall software. Therefore, if I want to keep my computer connected to the network, I must keep my computer updated with patches from Microsoft Windows Update. Those patches often require a reboot of the computer.

Therefore, I, Damian Yerrick, cannot afford to own a computer system that does not have to be rebooted.

4.7 GB of DDR for $37

[yerricde]

For the price of the Ramdrive, I could easily get 2GB of DDR

I can get 4.7 GB of DDR for $36.94.

for the price of the Ramdrive I could get a motherboard that supported 64GB and fill a moderate chunk of it

If your operating system crashes, what happens? If your OS publisher pushes out a "security update" and asks you to restart your computer, what happens? If you lose power, will your UPS be able to power your motherboard for as long as it can power an external RAM drive?

Cool, but . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I didn't have to partition it in two for my GNU/HURD box.

Intel always thought so...

[danshapiro]

I used to work at Microsoft, and spent three years in the drivers & kernel group for Win98 and then Win2k. It was a running joke that every year Intel would give us a presentation showing a graph of the price/performance of flash vs. hard drives. The curves would cross in something like four years from the date of the presentation. Of course, evey year, the axes changed, but the graph (and hence the time until convergence) never did...

Re:Security

[Anonymous Coward]

This probably still wouldn't be good enough.
You should put a small explosive charge next to it just in case :)