Having a hard time finding any info on internal PCI-E RAM Drives (non-volatile) -- can someone provide me with a good link to real existing products?

Thanks, Rob.

why would you want one to be on PCI-E. That would need drivers atc. One that plugs into SATA would be better because then it comes up as a HDD.

gigabyte I-RAM

Hyper os systems hyper

cent

All of these will be volatile tho. If you want non volatile you would need an SSD. dabs.com and places like that sell these.

note: dud above posted his as I was tying this.

Thanks for the links/responses.

i-RAM appears to be the most cost effective but too bad it is limited to 4GB, even with a RAID setup using two it's still only 8GB. ($900)

I need 32GB drive (or higher) -- well "need" is subjective.

I looked at some of the other solutions and that do go to 128GB -- but at a cost ($4000 on upwards) that doesn't really justify their performance especially considering the CPU utilizatoion hit one takes.

But I can get two 15K rpm 36GB RAID 0 SCSI setup for about $360 for the drives and then another Adaptec SCSI PCI-X RAID controller with 256MB Cache for $580 -- $940 total.

Hmmm....

Areca have many models: looking at this unit http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 816131005R

Does Vista x64 and/or WinXP x32 base install fit on a 4GB? Need to check

What I might do is an i-RAM drive for the OS and then a Areca with four 74GB WD 10K and upgrade the Areca to 1GB.

$140 i-RAM
$300 4GB DDR for i-RAM
$600 Areca
$90 1GB SDRAM 333
$135 x 4 WD Raptor 10K

About $1650.

Anyone have CPU utilization numbers for the Areca?

Rob.

Any mention of access times (random)?

Good info, thanks.

Raptors are all NCQ, one hopes they're working.

Yes, cache misses. 16MB drive cache and 1GB controller cache -- both miss.

Looks like the i-RAM is definitely out for housing the OS, WinXP is 6-8GB Vista round 12GB. Too bad the DDR2 variant of i-RAM is vaporware. Gotta love Microsoft's bloatware OS.

If I could fine a more reasonably priced 16GB RAM drive that would be nice -- I'll keep searching -- something like the i-RAM what has 4 and 4 slots using DDR2 that supports 2GB module.

Hey does anyone know if RamDisk works under Vista? Their download page there only mentions XP and 2000. I'm thinking of getting this and I don't want it to screw everything up... 8)

If you run this type of RAMDisk you WILL need a 64bit OS at a minimum and since it doesn't yet support Vista x32 or x64 you'd have to use WinXP x64.

32bit memory address space will be the problem with RAMDisk on WinXP x32 or any x32 OS -- you would need to leave at least 2GB for the OS and then run a 2GB max RAMDisk (4GB would be max theorectical but no really possible run that and the OS). Not sure why the x64 limit is 16GB RAMDisk??

I got a quote for the Texas Memory Systems RamSan in a 16GB configuration -- $25,000. 32GB version $50,000 -- additional 32GB increments are $26,500.

Makes the HyperDrive4 setup seem affordable. There must be some reason why Gigabyte didn't move beyond 4GB in the real world.

That's not so bad; in the early 90s I had a 128MB RAM disk on my PC which retailed for around $50,000 (we got it for free on loan as we were selling them to our customers). Windows 3.1 ran real fast from a RAM disk .

I am interested in the idea of RAMDISK or some other method to speed up normal activities like web browsing. There are several products out there, but it is hard to know which ones are really good. My plan would be to go from 4gb to 8gb on Vista-64-bit, and use the addition as a ramdisk. It looks like that would cost about $100.
It does not look like SSD devices will pe price justifiable for a home user for a while.
Other than the browser temporary cache, are there any other good candidates to put a ramdisk? Is there any good access tracking software to analyze your specific usage patterns to find good ramdisk candidates?

As far as I can tell, readyboost is not helpful if you have plenty of ram. Is this correct, or am I missing something here?