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RAMdisk RAID?
drew_92123 asks: "I've got a friend who does a LOT of video editing but is on a limited budget. He is currently using a raid array and while quite large, it's not as fast as he had hoped. I had an idea and wanted to know if there is a way to make it a reality, so of course I though of all the brilliant minds here. I have about a dozen Pentium II computers with 1GB of RAM. I would like to upgrade them to 2GB and throw in some gigabit NICs and create a 1.9GB RAMdisk on each one. Then I want to use one of the computers to RAID the RAMdisks together to be shared via Samba most likely. They are all 1U systems, with no HDD's, just a 64MB IDE flash disk. Any ideas out there?" Has anyone successfully put together such a system? How well did it work for you and are there any caveats that you would like to share with others who would do the same?
Ever thought of just upgrading your SCSI controller? You can get RAID controllers that have insane amounts of RAM in them. That might patch up any access issues.
If your concern is extended duration throughput the multiple rack computers with ram *might* be an option, but most normal users wouldn't consider it due to the latency involved with going through the southbridge then the nic then the nic then the southbridge (of the other computer) then the north bridge. And that's just a one way trip.
Just don't shell out a bunch of money before you do a proof of concept.
~george
I completely second this. The costs of the hardware will not be worth it. I suspect that you would do a lot better adding disks to the array, creating another array, or upgrading the ram on the main machine. Although it sounds like a cool idea in concept, this is not a good idea if you're doing anything but playing arround with the tech. It does sound like a cool project, though.
How about a be- *bang!*
*smack* *thump*
*mass cheering*
Btw, it does seem to be a (disturbing) recent trend at Slashdot to try to troll whole stories, instead of just trolling comments. C'mon anyone who's taken even one networking or hardware class knows the speed heirarchy:
cache > memory > disk > network
And, with the amount of physical RAM drives out there (very few), you'd quickly realize that even a local RAM drive doesn't offer enough of a speed benefit to offset it's cost. C'mon editors, I know it sounds cool, but do you really have to post it?
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Ahh, come one... Anyone who is crazy enough to want to setup a lan-based-ram-raid-array (Whew...) is certainly going to be sane enough to set up some sort of serious power backup.
Of course just to repeat and be redundant, the bottle neck will simply come down to the NIC card, a possible solution would be to install several NIC's and spread the load out... But this person would be much better off simply buying a system that will either (a) handle 24 GB of RAM, or (b) has fast enough disks to please him...
Of course a better idea might be to buy a system that would support both (a) and (b) and then set the system up to use the ram as a primary holding area for data, then flush to the (now faster) disk array...
Either way this person is still affected by "The Sickness" that we all seem to suffer from (More, bigger, better, faster....)