DDR Drives

[Megalomaniac]

Well, I-Ram and DDRDrive are the two that i know of.
I-Ram is a PCI while DDRDrive is a PCIe 1x

they seem like good pagefile solutions for people who like to alt+tab,
there pretty much is not a single person out there who can alt+tab in and out of hl2 is less than 3 seconds (for most its more like 10)
it seems to me that that a drive that can hit the top of the I/O limit will be perfect for this.

[Asian Dub Foundation]

imo they still hold too little for my liking

[Eva_Unit_0]

problem with them is that, as it turns out, things like alt-tabbing and loading os's isn't as hd-limited as was once thought. I forgot where it was, but I read a review on the i-ram where they experimented using it as the swap drive, the main system drive, and the applications drive, and in all 3 scenarios the performance delta was marginal. Not because the drive was slow...but because it turns out the extra bandwidth isn't really used in normal desktop usage.

the only real use I can see for these would be for incredibly high-load servers...and then the small size and volatile data would become problems anyway.

I mean, they ARE fast...no doubt about that. And raw-bandwidth benchmarks show that clearly (like measuring how long it takes to copy a large file onto itself). But when you get into REAL performance benchmarks, there's maybe a ~30% decrease in load times. Not worth in IMHO.

source (http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480)

[Megalomaniac]

becomes a price/perfomace comparison.

raptop 150 or a ddr HD

The DDRdrive is the one im waiting for, since its will be PCIe

I belive that it might also be SATA II, so the I/O might go up too.

I have also seen some mention of the Rocket Drive?
but on a german site i believe

[DougLite]

The iRAM interfaces over SATA. The PCI connection on it is just for power. Not sure on the DDR drive, may be the same way.