Something that doesn't spin

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Fort_Major

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 22, 2006
Messages
425
I am curious if there are any technologies that are are or could be potential viable options to having a hard drive that spins 7200 or 10k times. Are there companies out there that are looking at other (solid state?) storage that does not require spinning spindles? Curious on information, links and other information to research off of and other people's opinions.

Thanks;
 
they are avaliable (most commonly called "ram discs") but are insanely expensive, as you can expect 150GB or so of ram to be..

I seem to recall someone on this board reporting that 150gb solidstate disk from some company would be over 70k.
 
lithium726 said:
they are avaliable (most commonly called "ram discs") but are insanely expensive, as you can expect 150GB or so of ram to be..

I seem to recall someone on this board reporting that 150gb solidstate disk from some company would be over 70k.
Click to expand...

And huge.
 
I know they are slower, but has anyone tried using the usb drives? if all you care about is no moving parts, this could be the solution.
 
Aronj66 said:
I know they are slower, but has anyone tried using the usb drives? if all you care about is no moving parts, this could be the solution.
Click to expand...
Most usb drives have fairly awful write lifespans. It'd be OK for reading from, but as soon as it gets used for a swap file it's going to get wrecked.

There's always the gigabyte ram drive. It's more expensive than a raptor, and only 4 slots for ram, but you gotta love access times in the nano-second range.

Solid State Disks (SSDs) have great performance, but suck for price and power usage.
 
Searching for Solid State Drives seems to garner alot of FUD and !!!!!!

I see that back in 2004/2005 Samsung tested some 8(?)gb Flash drives that were supposed to show up in sub pcs and min-tablet pcs. I can't seem to find anything solid that is being targetted at or for consumers let alone prices.
 
Id be interested in an expresscard based ramdrive for use as a boot drive and during hibernations. Not like the slot is commonly used for anything else...
But other than that, the i-RAM is about the other accessible ram drive on the market.

now, several of those in raid would be interesting as a boot/game drive for a gaming box...damn quick load times FTW.
The iRAM sits in an expansion slot, right?
 
i-ram is fast but pricey
there are ssd drives, basically flash drives with hd interfaces, but they are expensive (several 100) and probably suffer the same probs as thumbdrives (wearing out).

What would be cool: a usb->ide adapter. I can get 8gb flash usb for $130, physically the size of a 2.5'' hd, if I can use as a boot drive for a lappy it would be interesting in spite of the wearing out and performance issues.
 
GLSauron said:
The iRAM sits in an expansion slot, right?
Click to expand...
Yes, it sits in a pci clot to draw power, but connects with a sata cable. Technically you could ghetto-mod it to be external if you wanted to supply your own power.

444 said:
What would be cool: a usb->ide adapter. I can get 8gb flash usb for $130, physically the size of a 2.5'' hd, if I can use as a boot drive for a lappy it would be interesting in spite of the wearing out and performance issues.
Click to expand...

All you need is a CompactFlash -> ide converter. It's a dumb device, only has to remap the pins. chiefvalue has one for under $10. If you want to use a regular usb thumbdrive, most modern mobos should be able to boot from it after you dig around in the bios.

Edit: Reread your post, and if it's 2.5" laptop harddrive-sived, go with one of
these . If it's pcmcia stuff, there's cheap pcmcia -> CF adapters as well. They're all based on the regular ata spec, just need to remap the pins to make the cable fit.

Edit2: Damn, poking around on that logicsupply site I found this. 2 gigs and plugs straight into an IDE slot.

 
I saw the review for the i-RAM. From their reviews it seems like the performance gain was pretty negligible in most operations. It was rather disappointing as I thought that it would easily be able to have significant performance increases
 
Fort_Major said:
I saw the review for the i-RAM. From their reviews it seems like the performance gain was pretty negligible in most operations. It was rather disappointing as I thought that it would easily be able to have significant performance increases
Click to expand...
well, i guess that tells us all a lot about the fact that computers are pretty well engineered to only use slow IO when really, really necessary. Considering that a factor 10 (or is it factor 100?) improvement in access time with a factor 2 imrovement in STR does little in terms of performance improvement, it is clear that disks are not a limiting reagent in a lot of 'everyday' PC operations.

Now, if we are talking about database access etc., that is a different story.
 
Fort_Major said:
I saw the review for the i-RAM. From their reviews it seems like the performance gain was pretty negligible in most operations. It was rather disappointing as I thought that it would easily be able to have significant performance increases
Click to expand...
Running the i-RAM as the C: drive is fun but hardly earthshaking.
Noticably more responsive than a Raptor RAID array.

I've been surprised that no review has mentioned what I consider to be it's main side-benefit...it's absolutely dead silent.
Took me a while to notice but now I love it for that reason alone.

Might get another and RAID it.
Keeping x64 XP below 4GB is kinda limiting.
 
There is one major company that does BLURAY dvd storage. The discs right now are at 30Gb and will be up to 60Gb before too long. It is a good alternative for disaster recovery. You can keep that machine on site and every once in a while (once a month) pop out the optical storage and move it somewhere safe. It's not ideal for applications where you need instant access to large files, but most of the data that people have just sits around anyways.
 
sproket,

Don't be a lightweight. Get 4 of em and run them in RAID 1+0 and keep a hot spare on hand. ;)
 
444 said:
i-ram is fast but pricey
there are ssd drives, basically flash drives with hd interfaces, but they are expensive (several 100) and probably suffer the same probs as thumbdrives (wearing out)..
Click to expand...

by thumbdrive, you mean USB flash drive? If so, wearing out as in the data retention only last 10 yr. or do you mean something else?
 
IIRC they wear out after a certain number of accesses... unless I'm thinking of something outdated. Like a few years instead of 10.
 
the USB Flash drives are limited to a number of write cycles. After a while they wear out from the "flashing".
 
drizzt81 said:
well, i guess that tells us all a lot about the fact that computers are pretty well engineered to only use slow IO when really, really necessary. Considering that a factor 10 (or is it factor 100?) improvement in access time with a factor 2 imrovement in STR does little in terms of performance improvement, it is clear that disks are not a limiting reagent in a lot of 'everyday' PC operations.

Now, if we are talking about database access etc., that is a different story.
Click to expand...
But that's not true. Most of the time I am waiting on my hard drives. Especially when developing and compiling.
#2 -> The article points out that the i-ram drive has alot of small structural flaws that seem to add up to the poor performance. Plus I am not even sure if it was paired up with a PCI-E
 
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