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?

Comments

Trading disk latency for network latency

[pjcreath]

Um, aren't the network latency and bandwidth constraints going to obliterate any benefit you get from using RAM disks?

Not the most in-expensive option

[doozer]

Though what your suggesting would work, and I've done similar things before,
think of the additional costs:

12GB of Ram
12 Gig nic cards
1 >12 port Gig ethernet switch.
Setup time

For what your looking at spending, it may be the same cost as buying some U320
scsi disks and some sort of SCSI raid card.