View Full Version : anyone know where I can find a cheap RAM drive developer?
with ye olde SDRAM being displaced by DDR and RDRAM on the newer motherboards, I wonder if anyone is ever going to come up with some sort of RAM drive to hold either old SDRAM sticks or possibly the host of new smart cards out there?
I'm not talking about something too far fetched, but think if you had something that looked like a temporary drive letter for immediate storage of things like game graphics off the game CD, and then have some sort of unsophisticated batch file that transfered the files there when a certain game was launched, you get outstanding performance from older systems that were typically bogged down by drive seek times......
Most RAM or solid state drives out there do something similar, but at $16,000 for 3GB - it's way out of my price range. But something like the old heath kits - and say, 10 or 12 sticks of 100mHz 64MB sticks is something almost anyone can easily afford......
Can anyone suggest a company with an engineering staff that looks at ways to re-utilize what some feel is junk? - ie 64MB sdram sticks - and make a simple IDE device that makes a huge bank of these look like a temporary drive letter? After all - some really good games come on one CD - appx 640MB or less - and if that entire CD was loaded into a RAM drive made of 10 64MB sticks.....
see where I'm going with this?
basically - the Walmart version of a RAM drive....
Mntsnow
03-02-2002, 9:05 PM
basically - the Walmart version of a RAM drive....
Hehe :) I dont :( but would love one as well!
Axel virual drive to put the whole cd on my HD and the virual drive makes the puter think the cd is in the computer by asigning a drive letter to it. I had to do this with about 10 games on my kids puter as the cd's always turned up missing or broke go figure.
But have you noticed that Virtual CD doesn't work for most of todays CD games? The protection prohibit Virtual CD from working properly...
Hellmund
03-03-2002, 5:58 AM
Well.....to be honest maybe a few sticks of 512mb of SDRAM would do and simply make it a Ramdrive....Don't bother with copy protection....just put a game in the ramdrive and simply remove the codes that makes it look for the original.....u purchased the software so it's urs to modify presuming you don't sell it;)
I don't want a copy on the hard drive - you're defeating the purpose which is speed.
I'm not looking for another logical drive partition -
I want a single or double size 5.25 piece of IDE hardware that holds cheap SDRAM I can buy as I find it that is assigned a drive letter.
I see the ideal as something that is expandible into as many free 5.25 bays you have open in your case - so, say, standard 5.25 sized cases that you could string together and each case would hold 10 sticks of standard 168pin or even 72 pin RAM sticks.
Ideally - I'd find identical sticks of SDRAM on sale in junk shops - and be able to easily match 10 sticks of RAM, again, ideally from the same manufacturer. - hopefully avoiding any types of speed, error correction, or architecture miss-match issues.
Again - ideally - the "kit" would come with better than average software that would be able to fully test a stick of RAM placed in a designated "test" slot.
Another thing I see is that the test slot is fully accessible from the front of the 5.25 bay.
What you'd end up with is a really cheap RAM drive that you fill with inexpensive junk after-market RAM - target price range for the kit and software less the RAM you provide would be about $180 -
That's what I'm looking for -
surrealchereal
03-03-2002, 11:31 PM
Haven't I seen a gizmo that holds a smart card ? I think so ..
Must think,,,
uh oh..
Hellmund
03-04-2002, 3:53 AM
I don't want a copy on the hard drive - you're defeating the purpose which is speed.
Well a HDD IS usually 30mb/sec with a standard 2mb buffer and 7200rpm spindle.....however a RAM drive is quite different.....basically let's say u load a board(average is about 3 DIMM's) with 3 512mb DIMM's, that gives 1536mb RAM, then use a program to convert say 1024mb into a RAMDRIVE, that actually will then give u 64bitX100(assuming PC100 RAM@100) /8 which gives approximately..... 800mbps...that's a FAIR bit more than a normal HDD. There's also one other flaw with your idea I see, if u made a IDE device of that nature then u simply wouldn't be able to use it to it's potential...the maximum data transfer that can occur in the IDE/PCI channel is 133mb/ps.....that's shared however between every PCI and IDE device...Hence a device of that nature would be vastly underused....The only advantage it would retain is latency over normal IDE magnetic drives.
Hellmund - - I'm not looking for a cutting edge wonder here..... I'm talking about putting junk DIMMs to good use - buying new 512DIMMS isn't part of the picture......
Consider this to be low end middle ware - to be used by tinkerers and people who cruise the "discount electronic" stores of the world picking through junk to find a few jems.....
I'd say the closest thing to compare it to is IDE RAID - definitely not top of the line tech, but a way to use the low end tech better to achieve results we cannot typically afford.....
real RAM drive is appx $5,333.00 per GB - I'm talking about the budget RAM drive for John Q Tinker for under $200.00......
jadison
03-04-2002, 3:25 PM
You've definitely brought about an interesting concept hear, Axel. :)
Hellmund
03-05-2002, 4:41 AM
Well....basically u would need a memory controller capable of that kind of operation(likely would need to custom made....that's never been cheap in my experience)....EM interference isn't a problem with low speed ram like that so the amount DIMM's isn't a problem....however with that many DIMM's there would have to be a LOT of copper traces...that would require a many layered PCB as I understand it....that increases cost quite a bit...I don't see this ended up being in a sub-$200 bracket....
I really think that a simple 7200rpm IDE HDD with an 8mb buffer would give close performance.....as I recall the last benchmarks I saw indicated about 50mb/ps consistent....I wish robrich would see this...he could give a LOT more insight but IMO that's just not gonna be practical.....
okay - so - Hellmund - which company would I go to that has the engineering talents to look into something like this and make it economically viable?
Promise technologies perhaps? After all - they dove head first into IDE Raid......
think I'll do a little surfing and see who might bite.....
In the vicinity of CompactFlash Card standards should be the electronic circuitry for such a thing, not just as IDE but like PCMIA adaptors.
Just a thaught;)
Hellmund
03-07-2002, 4:20 AM
Bitboys...I heard their upcoming Glaze3d chipset has a 1024bit memory interface....that's huge and would in theory require a HUGE 1024 individual copper traces...if they did that cheaply then there's a start......
I'm outa my league here though, this is thought not FACT....rob's pretty well a computer engineer though not officially I don't think but close enough...he's certainly be able to offer much more real-world advice....and if u do pursue he'd no doubt have a better idea where to look.
http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm they must have heard of your dreams;)
Mntsnow
03-19-2002, 9:55 AM
RDS-000-M
Product #: RDM000M32
Rocket Drive for Windows with 512MB
Our Price: $999.00
RDS-001-G
Product #: RDS001G32
Rocket Drive for Windows with 1GB
Our Price: $1,799.00
RDS-002-G
Product #: RDS002G32
Rocket Drive for Windows with 2GB
Our Price: $2,999.00
RDS-004-G
Product #: RDS004G32
Rocket Drive for Windows with 4GB
Please call Cenatek at 408.782.1220 for pricing.
bhess
03-19-2002, 10:56 AM
Ouch! I was reading this thread and getting more and more interested untill mntsnow ruined it.
SalaTar
03-19-2002, 7:51 PM
Lets see if I fallow this right?
Axel,
you want to plug say all your 64meg sticks of old sdram to a 3.5 ide unit that acts as a ram drive for a OS?
(so 8 slots of 64 is 512 ram drive IDE module)
correct?
Mntsnow
03-19-2002, 7:59 PM
Sorry Bhess :(
<goes and sits in corner>
I like the idea. One drawback I see is I would want to use all the pc66 and pc100 that's useless now. But back then it was only 32 or 64mb. So you would need a lot of slots and leftover ram to be any good at all.
making use of a PCI slot makes SO much more sense than going through IDE or SCSI for the connection -
I was taken in as well until I saw that price tag - wow - $1000 for performance - not quite what I had in mind.
I wish others would take on the challenge and produce something like this - a little competition might bring the price down - to about a third.
I wish they'd just sell the board and not throw in RAM with it, but understand that unless they supplied the whole package, the support costs of the system would kill them.
Otherwise - this is the way to go - a lot cheaper already than the $5333.00 / gb other manufacturers are offering. That's probably where the pricing model comes from.
I'd love to find one of these at a swap meet for $100 or so -
I don't know enough about the engineering to know for sure - but would it make any sense to make an AGP slot card with RAM? I usually opt for a PCI video card myself as it's almost always a lot cheaper and the performance increase on the strategy games I play isn't worth the expense.... just don't know if you could make the system see that as anything but a video card. Just thinking out load -
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