111–120 of 128 posts
RAM disks are an old and well-established concept. I'm not clear on what this 'product' adds to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive
I'd definitely want the 256 gib version for my OS, if it was in stock.
Since they are apparently so common, can you point me to a solution that gives me 7 GiB/s transfer rate for around that same price?
Not a new concept. Has been done a few times before. The use cases are very small, and getting smaller these days as motherboards accept larger and larger memory modules. https://www.newegg.ca/gigabyte-gc-ramdisk-others/p/N82E16815...
Which is only possible if volume is high.
Which is unlikely.
Prices aren't listed. I'd like to see prices. I've always wanted to be able to use older RAM as swap. Or an array of older SD cards as an SSD. Or similar. Never was there a big enough market to make sane products, though.
When doing my PhD around 2004 I was running simulations with Fortran programs to do optimizations. A genetic algorithm would call the Fortran program and change the parameters by creating input files and reading output files. I found out that disk access was the bottleneck of the optimisations. So I used a RAM disk software to create a disk-drive in RAM. It increased the simulation speed by orders of magnitude.
But in general it was not worth the setup hassle and the possible RAM-starving of other server jobs, stuff was generally not urgent.
Interesting design. They use FPGAs to emulate NAND storage with DDR, then use a standard NAND SSD controller. It doesn't perform any better than fast NVMe SSDs for larger, sequential operations. However, it appears to be an order of magnitude faster for the random 1K read/write operations. It also has infinite durability relative to an SSD, though obviously your data isn't infinitely durable during a power outage sce…
Would be interesting if there would be a case for slapping an SSD on the back of it and giving it just enough capacitor power to dump whatever is on RAM to the SSD once a power-out happens (and restore upon boot). SSD writes would be super low (rarely) and only happen during power issues or shutting it all down.
in 1999 i was working for an NYC fintech startup (first after-hours ECN to publish quotes on SuperSOES) and around then we paid an absolute fortune for a battery-backed-up giant RAM disk. i don't remember how much RAM it had, but it was a ruddy big rackmounted box with 2x car batteries and a lot of soldered RAM in it, and it allowed us to trade-match much faster than our competitors at the time. the RAM was presented…
IIRC it was a 1 or 2U unit with a few small lithium ion batteries inside. Phenomenal unit. It could have been configured as a block device but we used it for hot data in an auto-tiering setup with SSDs and rust in the other tiers.
Loved it to bits. No matter what we threw at it, the network was always our bottleneck.
RAM disks are an old and well-established concept. I'm not clear on what this 'product' adds to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive
being cheap and available is a rather good addition. I'd definitely want the 256 gib version for my OS, if it was in stock. Since they are apparently so common, can you point me to a solution that gives me 7 GiB/s transfer rate for around that same price?
Of course, getting 256GB of DDR5 or even DDR4 RAM is going to cost quite a lot, and most motherboards probably won't have enough slots for this! Also it would probably be much more expensive!
If only Intel hadn't cancelled Pmem. Insanely high speed, density to match NVMe, could have changed the way we use computers (or at least powered some killer DB servers)
Are you talking about Optane/3D-XPoint? The physics behind it seemed insane to me, amazing that they got it to work. I heard that the NVME protocol was originally designed with it in mind
There is MRAM available with DDR3 interfaces, albeit with a relatively small page size compared to standard DRAM. It's a bit expensive. We'll see if ReRAM ever gets commercialized. There are lots of persistent memory technologies possible, but it takes a lot of money to commercialize such a bleeding edge product. Especially when DRAM keeps getting faster (in bandwidth, not latency) interfaces every few years.
in 1999 i was working for an NYC fintech startup (first after-hours ECN to publish quotes on SuperSOES) and around then we paid an absolute fortune for a battery-backed-up giant RAM disk. i don't remember how much RAM it had, but it was a ruddy big rackmounted box with 2x car batteries and a lot of soldered RAM in it, and it allowed us to trade-match much faster than our competitors at the time. the RAM was presented…