I am trying to build a small "ram drive" that will plug into an IDE cable and be seen by the computer as a harddrive. my idea is to use a few old 72 pin ram chips dropped into sockets on the board. I was thinking of using 8 slots. 4 Megs per slot. I also know I am going have to have circutry inbetween the IDE port and the RAM sockets. It will need to tell the Bios that there is a 32 MB harddrive hooked up. preferably it can be switched master/slave but not necisarily. I am not worried about dataloss due to power loss as this is for temp files. any ideas on this are welcome.
Thank you.

 

You could try bouncing this idea off the MSN group "Hardware Junkies"

This is something a few computer tech's have recomended, running windows in ram for net applications, kills cookies , spyware and viruses dead. no special software required that slows system down

 

thank you for the idea on anther place to discuss this idea, at this point I dont want to make windows fit into it however that could be in idea for a bigger version of it if it with a battery backup or something along those lines. at this point I am mainly after getting the small one working to hold temp files.
thanks again.

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you could possibly get an adapter to a 128 MB smartcard to fit an IDE cable, though I don't know if it'll be picked up by windows, the FAT (File Allocation Table) probably isn't formatted to windows format.

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E=MC^18357891237358179238, it\'ll still come out right every time. Try it some time, it\'s all relative to the equation.

Take that Einstein.

 

As I stated before I would like for this device to be seen by the bios even as a harddrive. If anyone has schematics for any harddrives or know any of the signals the "HD" would need to send out to tell the system that it is a harddrive of X size it would be greatly appreatiated. Thank you.

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http://techdragon.dr.ag

 

there is a company on the web that makes some solid state hard drives as well as providing the chips to make one yourself if you wish.
www.m-sys.com/
excellent website. there chips are more or less designed to be hard drives and the connection between ide and chip would require little to no glue.

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\"the gears of life are not always lubed\",
duane woods

 

I know Compact Flash has an IDE access mode.

Arma Design has a development board that you can access the Compact Flash card directly through an IDE cable OR with a PIC 16f877.

I'm trying to reproduce the PIC access to the CF card myself, for datalogger storage, but it looks like direct connect to IDE is pretty simple.

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Mark Higgins

 

Try this.

http://www.stanford.edu/~csapuntz/ide.html