RAM Disk Puts New Spin On the SSD

theraindog writes "Although the solid-state storage market is currently dominated by flash-based devices, you can also build an SSD out of standard system memory modules. Hardware-based RAM disks tend to be prohibitively expensive, but ACard has built an affordable one that supports up to 64GB of standard DDR2 memory and features dual Serial ATA ports to improve performance with RAID configurations. And it's driver-free and OS-independent, too. The Tech Report's in-depth review of the ANS-9010 RAM disk pits it against the fastest SSDs around and nicely illustrates the drive's staggering performance potential with multitasking and multi-user loads. However, it also highlights the device's shortcomings, including the fact that SSDs are more practical for most applications."

Comments

I RTFA and now speculate

[moteyalpha]

It seems that with a little firmware it could be coaxed to do some content addressability. Considering that it is 10x faster inside than the peak of the SATA interface. It seems to me that there is a lot of potential. I always liked the ram disks when they were popular ISA cards and this could be the thing that could use the full power of USB 4.0 [sic]. Applications could be changed to take advantage of this speed. If lists and SQL databases could be sorted on the drive without CPU overhead, it could be very useful.

Re:What I learned from the article

[Forge]

This brings up an interesting idea.

What if the ramdisk function was moved into the motherboard chipset? This would achieve 2 things:

1. It would dramatically cut the cost of a ramdisk. I.e. The cost of the entire motherboard might go up by $5 or so.

2. It would eliminate that SATA bottleneck, allowing ramdisk to run at full RAM speed.

If you then figure out a way to have this data loaded to the ramdisk from a hard drive at poweron (or get realy clever and mount a flash chip on or near each DIMM which takes a backup of that DIMM, just before powerdown.