4 ms·

if they really wanted to make waves they would unveil the world's fastest AND the world's largest hard-drive, two in one, with an onboard battery and hybrid 64,

if they really wanted to make waves they would unveil the world's fastest AND the world's largest hard-drive, two in one, with an onboard battery and hybrid 64, 128, or 256 GB of RAM (not SSD) in 2x, 4x, or 8x 32gig dimms exposed as a physical Drive, costing +/- $800, $1600, and $3200 respectively, in addition to the 16 TB second physical drive, all integrated in one package so you can't disconnect the battery and nuke your lightning-fast drive without being extremely aware that you're doing so. The hard drives would have ironclad firmware that keeps the RAM refrehsed until its battery goes down to 15% (or whatever the conservative 10 minutes of power is), at which point it takes the ten minutes to dump the contents of that RAM to SSD, and reverts to having that drive also be SSD until the power is reconnected long enough to charge battery back up to 80%. Then it reads it back into RAM and continues as a Lightning Fast 64 GB + Very fast 16 TB drive. You would store your operating system on the lightning-fast drive. The absolute nightmare failure state isn't even that bad, as even though the RAM drive should be as ironclad as SSD, in case it ever should lose power unexpectedly through someone opening the device and disconnecting the battery or something, it can still periodically be backed up, so that if you pick up the short end of six sigma, you can just revert to reading the drive from SSD rather than RAM and lose, say, at most 1 day of work. thoughts? I bet a lot of people would be happy to pay an extra $800 to have their boot media operate at DIMM speed, as long as the non-leaky abstraction is that it is a physical hard drive, and the engineering holds up to this standard. There is a lot of software out there that is very conservative about when it considers data to be fully written - it would be quite a hack for Samsung to hack that abstraction by doing six or seven sigma availability on a ramdrive with battery and onboard ssd to dump to.

rzzzt 11y ago
The basics of your idea were captured in a device in 2009: http://2xod.com/articles/ANS_9010_ramdisk_review/ http://2xod.com/articles/ANS_9010_ramdisk_review/ It would be very interesting to see a similar product being introduced using contemporary technology, though. One question is what sort of interface it would communicate over to leverage the higher transfer speed.
- logicallee 11y ago
  I wonder if they have a patent. The idea is important and good enough to patent, and if they do I would defer to them on it. I wonder why they're not making anything these days? I think it is fine not to have any higher interface to leverage the transfer speed. RAM latency and speeds can obviously saturate disk interaces, but I doubt SSD's come close. So it should be a large jump in performance regardless.
- jotm 11y ago
  it goes way back to 2005: http://www.anandtech.com/show/1742 http://www.anandtech.com/show/1742
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    I think there have been RAM-based storage devices even older than that, connected to IDE. I have no idea how one would go about finding a reference these days though.
    - jotm 11y ago
      Yeah, I'm pretty sure I remember a similar card being announced when DDR was being widely adopted, but I can't find anything (which is pretty interesting in itself on the Internet, I once searched for specs on a dialup modem and could not find a mention of it, like it never existed :-))...
Nikker 11y ago
By relying on closed software on the Drives controller chips wouldn't it just get more complicated? With the price of RAM being as cheap as it is, why not just build a series of systems with 100GB+ of RAM and cache away? Relying on a drive controller might seem the right way to go but especially for corporate installations I would believe it would be beneficial to have the fine grained control a dedicated server could provide.
- logicallee 11y ago
  Because systems, including servers, don't expose an abstraction of being permanent (always-on) storage that never gets suddenly lost (rebooted, loses power) for any reason at any time. How could you run a laptop with a server inside that cached 100GB+ of RAM? You would have to wait for it to load from RAM. Not so with the device I outline: if it has 48 hours of trickle charge (my calculations could be wrong but apparently it just takes mere milliwatts to refresh a DIMM), then as long as it has received power in the last 48 hours it would be instant-on. Everything you do is instant, EVEN IF it's written against software that writes to permanent storage.
  - bryanlarsen 11y ago
    Sounds very much like the current suspend to RAM functionality that every laptop has, at great expense and complexity.
    - logicallee 11y ago
      only if you think having every disk access occur at ram speed rather than SSD speed makes no difference. CPU's and RAM are so fast, I think often in starting an application or the like, disk access really is the limiting factor. I suppose you can disagree. things like compilation could easily end up twice or five times as fast in my estimation. know anyone with a compilation in their workflow? I should have said "C: drive"/"HDA1" but wrote boot media so I could save having to think about my phrasing. I meant that's where you would install anything that is primary to your workflow and might read and write lots of files, because that's how it was programmed, git, your ide, compiler, test suites, database, webserver and log files, or whatever programs you create and handle your workspace with, whatever that may be (photoshop, design software, etc). the point is, things you would never risk not having on permanent storage, and which are written with the expectation that they will be. if it's ironclad (six/seven sigma, and backed up to real permanent storage behind the scenes in case worse comes to worst), you wouldn't have to give up this abstraction. it would still be a hard drive and not, you know, the current contents of your ram since you booted.
rasz_pl 11y ago
TMS RamSans, even they migrated from pure ram to SSDs

rzzzt 11y ago

The basics of your idea were captured in a device in 2009: http://2xod.com/articles/ANS_9010_ramdisk_review/ http://2xod.com/articles/ANS_9010_ramdisk_review/ It would be very interesting to see a similar product being introduced using contemporary technology, though. One question is what sort of interface it would communicate over to leverage the higher transfer speed.

logicallee 11y ago
I wonder if they have a patent. The idea is important and good enough to patent, and if they do I would defer to them on it. I wonder why they're not making anything these days? I think it is fine not to have any higher interface to leverage the transfer speed. RAM latency and speeds can obviously saturate disk interaces, but I doubt SSD's come close. So it should be a large jump in performance regardless.
jotm 11y ago
it goes way back to 2005: http://www.anandtech.com/show/1742 http://www.anandtech.com/show/1742
- nitrogen 11y ago
  I think there have been RAM-based storage devices even older than that, connected to IDE. I have no idea how one would go about finding a reference these days though.
  - jotm 11y ago
    Yeah, I'm pretty sure I remember a similar card being announced when DDR was being widely adopted, but I can't find anything (which is pretty interesting in itself on the Internet, I once searched for specs on a dialup modem and could not find a mention of it, like it never existed :-))...

Nikker 11y ago

By relying on closed software on the Drives controller chips wouldn't it just get more complicated? With the price of RAM being as cheap as it is, why not just build a series of systems with 100GB+ of RAM and cache away? Relying on a drive controller might seem the right way to go but especially for corporate installations I would believe it would be beneficial to have the fine grained control a dedicated server could provide.

logicallee 11y ago
Because systems, including servers, don't expose an abstraction of being permanent (always-on) storage that never gets suddenly lost (rebooted, loses power) for any reason at any time. How could you run a laptop with a server inside that cached 100GB+ of RAM? You would have to wait for it to load from RAM. Not so with the device I outline: if it has 48 hours of trickle charge (my calculations could be wrong but apparently it just takes mere milliwatts to refresh a DIMM), then as long as it has received power in the last 48 hours it would be instant-on. Everything you do is instant, EVEN IF it's written against software that writes to permanent storage.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  Sounds very much like the current suspend to RAM functionality that every laptop has, at great expense and complexity.
  - logicallee 11y ago
    only if you think having every disk access occur at ram speed rather than SSD speed makes no difference. CPU's and RAM are so fast, I think often in starting an application or the like, disk access really is the limiting factor. I suppose you can disagree. things like compilation could easily end up twice or five times as fast in my estimation. know anyone with a compilation in their workflow? I should have said "C: drive"/"HDA1" but wrote boot media so I could save having to think about my phrasing. I meant that's where you would install anything that is primary to your workflow and might read and write lots of files, because that's how it was programmed, git, your ide, compiler, test suites, database, webserver and log files, or whatever programs you create and handle your workspace with, whatever that may be (photoshop, design software, etc). the point is, things you would never risk not having on permanent storage, and which are written with the expectation that they will be. if it's ironclad (six/seven sigma, and backed up to real permanent storage behind the scenes in case worse comes to worst), you wouldn't have to give up this abstraction. it would still be a hard drive and not, you know, the current contents of your ram since you booted.

rasz_pl 11y ago

TMS RamSans, even they migrated from pure ram to SSDs