you're not going to believe this.

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 01:10:41PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:22:19PM -0700, Kurt Buff wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 16:07, Gary Kline<kline at thought.org> wrote:
> > 
> > For a small unit like this, SSD is really nice.
> > 
> > But, for my workstations/servers, I'm wondering if a pure
> > battery-backed RAM disk, in RAID1 with a regular hard drive, might be
> > the real screamer.
> 
> 	battery-backed ram sound great for the time being!

The downside is low capacity: 4-8 RAM modules, limiting these devices to
64GiB. And they consume more power than HDDs when idle!
[http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/11]

> 	if not now [this minute], then relatively soon, i'm guessing
> 	within a few years somebody will have a solid-state device that emulates
> 	the current mechanical technology.  it will wind up being considerably 
> 	faster than the current drives and suck Much less juice.  

Intel's X25 is already faster
[http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/extreme/index.htm] and consumes
less electricity than a HDD [http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/11].

Of course RAM-based disks kick ass when writing
files. [http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/6]

> 	oh yeah, and in a few years *every* computer will have a battery back up
> 	--not just our laptops.  after some N minutes everything will be saved.
> 	much less lost data due to sudden power outtages.

I don't think so. Not every part of the world suffers from regular power
outages. And efficient batteries require rare raw materials like
lithium, with demand far outstripping winnable reserves.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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