Ok folks, I've spent a little time researching this today, and can only find it on one english speaking site. Basicly RAMDisk is permanent solid state storage that uses sticks of DDR to store the information rather than platters. Call it a super fast "hard drive emulator". As a result, the access time, read and write rates are the same as the DDR RAM. Here's the gist of how this thing works as far as I can tell...

Look at the first photo here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/ytteB/ramdisk1.jpg
Most of it is all on the PCI card. When booting, as far as the bios can tell, it's basicly an extremely fast HDD controller card. You have here 4 dimm slots that will accept a total of 4G of PC-???? DDR each. That's a total of 16G of storage. Capacity is sacrificed for speed in this case. This is all at great expense, since a 4GB stick of DDR comes at a hefty price (http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno=262767).

Next photo:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/ytteB/ramdisk3.jpg
Here we see what makes DDR permanent storage. The RAM holds the data even when the computer is turned off thanks to a small NiMH rechargeable battery. In the case of curruption, there is a serial ATA connector for more permanent storage on a traditional hard drive. This hard drive will hold the true image on a small partition while the remaining space will show as a traditional hard drive in windows, which can be used for slower mass storage.

At present, the model shown is bottlenecked by the PCI bus, however, a PCI Express x16 version is supposedly in the works.

So, anyways, my birthday is coming up in July, and if anyone wants to chip in...;)

It looks kinda like the memory cards Dell uses in its top of the range servers, different purpose though.

Due to the necessity to refresh SDRAM, the add-on hard drive would be a MUST!!

This is all at great expense, since a 4GB stick of DDR comes at a hefty price (http://www.pcmall.com/pcmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno=262767).
holy cwap... :eek3:

This concept has been around for a fair amount of time. However, the expense has always been horrible.
I have know persons who jury rig this by putting in a large amount of ram in their pc and use a virtual ram drive with power on\off batches to copy data to and from a hard drive. Plus, they used a ups. Too much work.

I'd be too scared of that battery dying.. then POOF! all gone..

I'd be too scared of that battery dying.. then POOF! all gone.. No it wouldn't the image would still be on the hard disk.

Imagine just having your OS on that partition.

Boot time
Power up...
ZAP! all done. Here's the desktop.

Imagine just having your OS on that partition.

Boot time
Power up...
ZAP! all done. Here's the desktop. I'd be more amped about spawning first all the time :eekdance:

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050601_115506.html

I'd just install 4x512MB. That should hold the whole OS on it. Then I'd buy the memory when it goes on sale at Fry Electronics for $25 per 512MB PC3200 stick.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31/gigabyte_ramdisk/http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050601_115506.html says that the PCI bus is just used for power. It transfer data over a SATA-I connection, giving SATA-II transfer rates (300MB/sec).

I'll be buying one. I just hope that it works with Kingston memory. If it does than I'll start stacking up on RAM now.

Another option would be for those of us who already have 2G in our machines to remove 1G and install it onto the Gigabyte RAM card. Presto, twice the speed. Or imagine moving over to another machine, like going from an Intel to an AMD. You use the Intel memory in that card...

Why bother with WD Raptors? The above article says that you can install 2 cards in a Raid configuration...

Just look at the tranfer rate graphs in the above link. wow.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31/gigabyte_ramdisk/http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050601_115506.html says that the PCI bus is just used for power. It transfer data over a SATA-I connection, giving SATA-II transfer rates (300MB/sec).

Looks like I was waaaay off target on that one. Thanks for clearing that up about the SATA connector. (I was working off of limited resources (http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=393127).) I can't see myself getting something like that now though. There's just not enough space for your money, and without some sort of more permanent storage to back it up, it just seems too... risky. :hmm: