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Originally Posted by Jason Dunn
I think it's a RAM-based drive. i.e.: you have 2 GB of RAM that you can load software into, and it's executed at the speed of RAM rather than a hard drive that's 1000's of times slower. Cool concept, but I've never seen it implemented in a consumer-level product.
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Well, I figured that it was RAM based, but I was trying to imagine exactly what that kind of a module would look like, the casing, etc. - I've never actually seen one and didn't know they existed - so I was thinking, "What on earth is this thing?". And without knowing the capacity, the speed factor alone makes it impossible to truly understand it's value. Interesting concept, though.
How do you know that it was 2GB, or are you just takin' a guess? I didn't happen to see the capacity of these "drives" on their site. Are you aware of what the maximum capacity could be for a single RAM drive? (Not just for a laptop, but for a desktop or server as well)? I'm curious.
Although I'd love to have a HDD solution that operated as fast as RAM, apart from speed, why would someone want to replace a 60 GB 7200rpm HDD, for example, (which seems to work for practically everyone else out there, including the military for many applications) with only a 2GB RAM drive, when they could place that much and potentially more into their system as typical DDR RAM, anyway, and of course, for a
much lower cost? Especially when considering the added speed and capacity someone could achieve with a RAID 0 setup (even in a laptop). The only difference that I can see between typical RAM and a RAM drive would be non-volatility with the RAM drive.
Based on only 2GB and the above statements, it seems that even though you'd be gaining a lot of speed, you'd be sacrificing an awful lot - capacity and money.
I think this way because I would think that any scientists or researchers, for example, who thought they could take advantage of this kind of speed, would need a
lot more than a few gigs of non-volatile storage for their apps. But even if the capacities for a RAM drive were equal to that of the HDD's we typically use, while also considering the highest end needs, I'm trying to understand where something like this would truly be required apart from military applications. When thinking of other industries, I think of a company like Pixar, for example, who would need the highest end equipment to accomplish their tasks - aren't they just using high speed SCSI or serial drives for their work? The military could justify the expense of high capacity RAM drives, but apart from simply wanting to have the technology, I wonder what other industries could honestly justify the expense?
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