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What if we gave up on the idea of fixed disk storage and just filled our computers with enough fast RAM to use as a permanent RAMdisk that wrote to these super

What if we gave up on the idea of fixed disk storage and just filled our computers with enough fast RAM to use as a permanent RAMdisk that wrote to these super fast SSDs on occasion, effectively treating the SSD as a backup for the RAMdisk? With a proper battery backup implemented, I imagine it could work. 2 GBytes/sec is crazy fast. That's my entire steam library in 20 seconds. What percentage of those files change per day? 10% or so at most? So when I shut it off, its syncs up the diff in 2 seconds. When storage gets this fast and RAM this cheap, why bother with fixed disks? Imagine the new Macbook Air with 8gb RAM installed and another 128gb as a RAM disk and a 128gb SSD to back up the RAMdisk.

frozenport 12y ago
>> and just filled our computers with enough fast RAM to use as a permanent RAM disk Current ram implementations use a lot more power compared to an SSD, and might not be suited for a laptop.
vessenes 12y ago
We have servers like this, and under a surprisingly large number of load scenarios you only get a little speedup. There are use cases where it's helpful, but there are lots of little things that slow down performance that aren't disk-bound, like single-threaded waits for a piece of networking code to timeout, or waits for code that's CPU bound, they all add up. I used to dream of what you're talking about, but from my own experience in the last year, it just doesn't matter that much for the daily experience using a computer. 16GB of RAM is plenty right now, SSDs are very fast for many tasks, I'd look at upgrading your internet bandwidth after that if you want your computer to feel faster.
seunosewa 12y ago
How is this better than a MacBook Air with 128+8gb of ram and a 128gb super-fast SSD? Why buy a super-fast SSD and only use it for daily backups?
bobbles 12y ago
End-game should be that my PC just has 'storage' that ranges from RAM to cloud-based auto-backed up data. The computer should automatically optimise this for commonly used or 'app' style data and keep the information in the level of storage that makes sense.

frozenport 12y ago

>> and just filled our computers with enough fast RAM to use as a permanent RAM disk Current ram implementations use a lot more power compared to an SSD, and might not be suited for a laptop.

vessenes 12y ago

We have servers like this, and under a surprisingly large number of load scenarios you only get a little speedup. There are use cases where it's helpful, but there are lots of little things that slow down performance that aren't disk-bound, like single-threaded waits for a piece of networking code to timeout, or waits for code that's CPU bound, they all add up. I used to dream of what you're talking about, but from my own experience in the last year, it just doesn't matter that much for the daily experience using a computer. 16GB of RAM is plenty right now, SSDs are very fast for many tasks, I'd look at upgrading your internet bandwidth after that if you want your computer to feel faster.

seunosewa 12y ago

How is this better than a MacBook Air with 128+8gb of ram and a 128gb super-fast SSD? Why buy a super-fast SSD and only use it for daily backups?

bobbles 12y ago

End-game should be that my PC just has 'storage' that ranges from RAM to cloud-based auto-backed up data. The computer should automatically optimise this for commonly used or 'app' style data and keep the information in the level of storage that makes sense.