IDE Bus Interface

[tansis]

With the price of memory chips dropping every few months, I got to wondering....

Is it posibble to build your own Solid State Hardrive ?
Nothing huge, enough to boot windows would do,
though the ability to add more storage media would be a bonus.

No moving parts, read/write speeds way faster than any spinning disc,
the prospect of booting WIn XP from cold to ready to rock in less than a second, its got to be worth it

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

With the price of memory chips dropping every few months, I got to wondering....

Is it posibble to build your own Solid State Hardrive ?
Nothing huge, enough to boot windows would do,
though the ability to add more storage media would be a bonus.

RAM is volatile, so you would need to keep it permanently powered, or at least backed up. Also modern RAM is dynamic (not static) so you need to provide refresh signals for it.

No moving parts, read/write speeds way faster than any spinning disc,
the prospect of booting WIn XP from cold to ready to rock in less than a second, its got to be worth it

Be nice if it would, but ignoring hard drive speed it would still take vastly longer than that!. Modern hard drives are very fast devices, most of the delay is Windows itself.

 

[bmcculla]

There is a product called a Rocket Drive that is just a bunch of SDRAM DIMMs on a PCI Card. It's fast but since the Bandwidth of the PCI bus is way slower than the RAM itself its fast but not that fast. The seek time is very fast though.

Windows has to initialize a lot of things that waste time so the fast disk would help but I'm with Nigel - under a second is unlikely.

Brent

 

[andrew2022]

most of the delay is Windows itself.

true

 

[bogdanfirst]

i read something some time ago, that they created some king of RAM that stored the information based on magnetic fields. so it didn't loose contents when powered off.
now, for the booting, i don't think that is it is possible for such a short time, i mean, consider the fact that the first few seconds of the booting process is the hardware detection, the BIOS does its job, and then the OS starts loading.

by the way, i found this nice thing...
https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995064

this is nice too
https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994567

maybe this is what you want?
https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993838

 

[bmcculla]

The magnetic RAM you're talking about is called FRAM (Ferroelectric ram). Ramtron makes ram modules based on this technology. FRAM can withstand almost infinite writes which makes it much better than EEPROM or Flash which you can wear out if your not carefull. The dissadvantage is that reads deteriorate the memory state so it needs to be refreshed periodicaly. Also most semiconductor manufacturing processes don't include the ability to include FRAM - it takes special equipment. There was a lot of buzz around FRAM a while ago because theoreticaly a computer running with FRAM as its main memory could power up immediatly with no delay- it would just continue running from where it left off when power was lost.