Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by steckerbrett on Thursday September 03, 2015 @04:14PM
(#10167259)
I wish people had continued this sort of thing, I had a Gigabyte i-Ram[0] and it was incredible. The most limiting factor was that it used DDR memory slots (maximum 4GB) and the SATA interface. I don't imagine there would be much of a barrier in doing this with more modern technology like PCI-e for the transfers and a big juicy FPGA for addressing substantially more memory. Alas.
Problem is the maximum capacity due to memory controller support more than anything else. But looking at the new NVMe SSD's the bottle neck isn't your SSD anymore and they aren't that expensive if you need those speeds for things like 4K video editing...
Re:SATA HyperDrive5 RAM Drive
by steckerbrett on Thursday September 03, 2015 @05:49PM
(#10167732)
Yeah, I like the concept more than have a need for the thing presently. The OPs page talks about a custom spun ASIC so making a controller wouldn't be a huge problem if someone wanted to sink the NRE into it.
You could maybe get 8GB in those days usually you would get only 4GB while it was possible to put an entire game or at least the big chunks of it on there or alternatively some video content it was clear that it would never get anywhere.
They are still much faster than SSD's the problem is not even the cost but it's the fact that none of those can any meaningful capacity even beyond the physical limitations the memory controllers we have just can't support a capacity which will be worth while..