Just don`t sit on my lap eh fella?
Solid state drives are not at all new to the PC industry.
For years, a form of solid state drive has been available to you and you may not have known about it. It`s called the "RAM drive". Even this poor excuse for a solid state drive bests the performance of ANY mechanical HDD in existance. The fact is, they are getting faster because memory speeds are climbing by leaps and bounds. A "true" battery backed-up solid state drive is actually not new either. The first implemetation was the "SCSI-DART". This was a SCSI device that boasted 16 30pin memory sockets for a total capacity of 64MB. Later, a SCSI-DART-II was built that boasted 8 72pin memory sockets and handled 128MB of memory. These "drives" boasted battery back-up and retained their information for about 3 months during inactivity. The first "dart" only had a transfer rate of 10MB/sec which was bested by HDD`s some time back. However, even at these slower data rates the "dart" had access times of well under 1 msec. The fastest Mechanical drives today are still greater the 6 msecs and most are in the 8-12 msec range.
The "Dart-II" used the SCSI/wide interface and had data rates that exceeded 20MB/sec. Still, the speed offered wasn`t enough to make the expense worthwhile.
For a drive to be useful, it has to be fast at BOTH read and write. Many of todays HDD`s boast high read rates but reduced "write" rates.
Quantum umongst others, are building "solid state" drives with rather eye opening capacities. The last "procuction" solid state drive I seen was a 1GB device.
Its data rate was limited by the PCI bus but still exceeded 240+ MB/sec with an "average" access rate of .05 Msec.
The device has no moving parts and generates little heat.
This puppy is expensive. I dont know the current price but last known is about the 1800 buck mark. (ouch)
There were many "ram drives" of sorts that used a PCB with dedicated memory for ram drives that used a form of "ram disk" software thats similar to Micky$ofts.
The problem with the software "ram drive" is both size and it being "volitile". The latter meaning that once the system were powered down, the data was lost.
Was that helpful?
Associate chancellor? When do I get a "wiz-bang" name?
[Edited by Toaster on 09-24-2000 at 11:01 PM]