3 ms·
> And here's another one that's weirder and weirder the longer you look at it. So it's a 5.25" bay mounted hard drive, but it's a RAM disk. Now a RAM disk is w
by vxNsr 7y ago
> And here's another one that's weirder and weirder the longer you look at it.
So it's a 5.25" bay mounted hard drive, but it's a RAM disk.
Now a RAM disk is when you use some RAM like a disk, but this isn't on the motherboard, so... how is it RAM? how does it connect?
see when they call this a RAM disk, they really mean it on the "DISK" part.
It's SATA!
It's a SATA drive you use like any other drive, it's just fast as hell because it's backed by RAM!
but doesn't RAM lose its contents when turned off?
YEP! that's why it has that big honking battery there, it keeps the RAM active when the PC is turned off.
I wonder how long that battery lasts for, also I guess wiping your data is easy... just unplug the battery, no way anyones gonna get at your data then.
- aidenn0 7y agoThese things were excellent back when flash had poor density and mediocre speeds; the cost per MB was similar when fully populated and it was significantly faster.
- sebazzz 7y agoUnfortunately SATA is the limiting factor. However, they would be awesome on the PCIe bus.
- vxNsr 7y agoThey were actually used? by who?
- p_l 7y agoCaches, scratch drives for compilation or whatever other disk intensive process you had, etc. Heavy industrial models were the ancestors of today's all-flash SAN arrays, later common in hybrid ram+flash. RAMsan was one of the major vendors.
- elFarto 7y agoCCP used one for Eve Online. They stuck their SQL server on it.
- p_l 7y agoI think I've seen some in person in 2008 used for, IIRC, some form of coordination in Oracle RAC.
- vxNsr 7y agowithout any idea what a SAN array is was this used as a kinda hybrid ram, where you'd keep all your data on a real harddrive and then on system boot push it all to this where it would stay for years until the next system boot?
- p_l 7y agoNo. SAN = Storage Area Network. Essentially networked block devices. a RAMsan array would terminate multiple 1-4Gbit links and provide a very fast block device (possibly subdivided into logical devices) that would be used by other computers. The contents were persistent, through battery storage + UPSes etc.
- rzzzt 7y agoLTT was mentioned in another subthread; they also did a video on the i-RAM, one of the implementations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYbCYgYZVT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYbCYgYZVT8