Rocket Drive

I just read an article on a Ram PCI card that acts as a Hard Drive. It comes in a 4GB ($4999) and 512MB ($999) module sizes.

It is recognized as a Hard Drive to your OS. You can load programs and access them at PC133 speeds. This would therefore elimate the seek time and bandwidth limitations of Hard Drives. It has an external Power Supply so the data doesn't get lost when the computer is shut off.

Future improvements would include, backup to a Hard Drive, onboard NiMH batteries, make them bootable, and have a module with 8GB of space.

I think that if they can make these cheaper, smaller, and more capacity, they could replace scsi in the Enterprise Server market.

As for desktops, only if your pockets are really deep.

well believe it or not those have been around for 2years or so.. TSS had time when i had my k6-2
but anyways, they use pc-133, not ddr yet, that i havent seen anyways. but im sure they be good to store things like a game, or the main os files or even if you went light, you could store everything on it for a sever. its a nice thing, altho there are programs that will allow you too ram drive extra ram that u allready have. ive seen ppl load quake into it, and it runs w/o a glitch.. thats something to do if you have over 768mb of memory, and really want the extra speed. there was an atricle in PC mag i read last night, saying those ramdrives are a good 30%+ faster, more if i could actually remember, the mags in the bathroom, and im too lazy to go get it

I actually have a 1 GB RocketDrive. I am still evaluating
it for various projects. The overall transfer rates are
limited by the PCI bus limit. The PCI bus limit is 132 MB/s
but the rocketdrive can only sustain about 70-80 MB/s.
So a good RAID could kick its butt for transfer rates
even on the old 33 MHz/ 32-Bit PCI bus. However,
it really shines in I/Os per second. Because there is
no rotational latency the RD can do thousands of
IO/s. This beats all but cached RAIDs.

Cost and size limitations of the RD may ultimately
kill it. There are actually very few applications that
make use of a RAMDRIVE. Classic DB apps are sped
up, but ultimately anything that must go thru a
file system driver is going to be slow and at a serious
disadvantage to In-memory DB engines. I'm not talking
about software RAMDRIVES, but no drives or file
abstractions at all!!!

i wonder if this would speed up photoshop?
i cant wait for ps7 mmmm yummy!

Yes, I think PS would be sped up...maybe a lot. But
be sure to configure it so you don't have so many
levels of undo. A 512MB or 1 GB RocketDrive can
seem pretty small.

Also note about the RocketDrive. Even though it
has 4 DIMM slots for SDRAM on it, you cannot
simply put bigger DIMMS on it later. The max size
is fixed at the factory. Buy a 512 MB unit and the
only way to increase the size it send it back to
the factory. This is an intentional marketing
shaft job and may very well be their undoing!!

yea, well im sure there money hungary. those ram disk drives probly dont cost more then 50bucks plus the ram. its a waste really.

Where did you read this article and where can I get one?

well im not too sure who sells them but go to google.com and search for "ram drive" and u should find more info on it

You can find information about software RAMDRIVES and
the solid state Rocket Drive at http://www.cenatek.com/

If they could make a pci card like that, and it used standard ram it might work. I could see having a bootable one with your windows files on it to have an almost instant boot-up, but I wouldn't risk storing windows files on that. For home use, as it is now, it is no more than a very expensive toy for playing with. There was a thread on this a long while ago, but it was about the idea, not the actually drive.

So what would be faster for games then? A rocketdrive, or 4 Cheetah X15 36LP (15k RPM) in a RAID 0 setup?

That depends entirely on the I/O characteristics of the
games. The RAID would probably be able to more more
MB/S for large transfers, but if the games make a lot
of little reads constantly the RD will come out ahead
because it essentially has no rotational latancy.