WTF is this thing? - RAM on a PCI Card??
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- Опубліковано 29 жов 2019
- When DDR2 launched, Gigabyte had a great idea with the i-RAM... take that old DDR1 memory and use it as your boot drive! So how did it turn out?...
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Watch 'til the end for a spooky bonus scene...
Or watch your World of Warship ad :-)
Boooooo!
no u
Was that Michael Jackson?
Spooky
"What kind of hard-drive do you use?"
"4GB of RAM"
That you downloaded.
10 gb.
i said hard drive...
Technically possible using a program like Imdisk (allows for quite a bit larger size then most programs & is free, though said ram disk will be deleted when putting pc too sleep or rebooting.)
lmfao
SSD: My dad has serious memory loss issues
I-RAM: What?!
I-RAM: I've never met this man in my life
🤣 🤣
Segmentation fault
:-) i thought of that
are those new slacks!!!
Without beard, looks so different
I know right
I got this recommended in 2020 aswell lol
Looks so much better without the beard, IMHO.
Was thinking the exact same thing
Linus got tired of being called the fact that he haven't hit puberty until he grew out a beard is when every one stopped making fun him 😂
this was interesting from a tech history perspective
There is people still using this device
All Linus needs is a funny goatee, a kepi, and a convincing "Hey guys" and he could launch Forgotten Tech.
There were dumb modules to convert 4 30 pin simm ( you know , 8 bit data ...386dx,a 32 bit cpu, required 4 in parallel ) into a 4x larger simm.. there were cards to add real , directly addressed, RAM into 286's. ( 24 addresses!). These could be bought empty,so that you could reclaim your DIP ram from older hardware. For the 8086 ,there were cards to bank switch extra ram .. oike virtual memory , but appearing to dos as a small chunk of RAM in the 640k to 1024k address range.. EMS ..emulated by emm386.exe , which after a while was only used to easily start, use protected mode and keep Dos .. surely this RAM drive would have been better as a scratch drive , for what you are doing at the time, the game files,or data files .. or as a swap drive ..
He said that "custom silicon was no problem for gigabyte". I think thats sarcastic..or error .. Custom silicon is expensive when divided by only 1000 .. so if the price each was more than a FPGA they used the FPGA.. back in DOS days there was ramdrive.exe , you would make the dos boot floppy load various utilities you might need . Edit, copy,xcopy ,format .. into it,so you could move on to the apps floppy disk and "work"...
@@SimuLord “Hey guys, Linus from Forgotten Tech.com, today we’re going to be taking a look at Nvidia’s first graphics card.”
Normal Tech UA-camrs: 9900KS and 1660 super reviews
LTT: HOW TO SHOVE RAM INTO YOUR PCI SLOTS
Randomosity YOU WANNA BOOT A 2 DECADE OLD OS ONTO 2 DECADE OLD HARDWARE, WHILE HAVING A 2 THOUSAND DOLLAR GPU ON THE BENCH. WE GOT YOU.
Something old that I'd never heard of before is still more interesting than trying to find something useful to say about a reheated existing product that doesn't do anything new anyways.
@@waveformdistortion I mean, 9900KS does something that 9900K doesn't
well... honestly... there is already about 100 videos saying basically the same thing - I kind of like that Linus isn't always on that hype... at least I get one tech video today about something other than 9900KS
@@budgetbajur Yes, it costs more.
who would've thought that random access memory was good at randomly accessing stuff
Shhhhhhhh, BuT SsDS.
got cards like this for my old 286 486 systems
That's deep
Peter Thress but it’s
would be very interesting to see a modern version of this with the high capacity high speed ECC ram now available and the high bandwidth of PCIE 4.0
with the speeds optane and Gen4 SSDs already have, the law of diminishing returns would give u little to no benefit considering the inherent disadvantage of RAM as storage (volatility)
@@xyeahtony1 yeah obviously, but it’d be cool to see right?
@@xyeahtony1 The volatility isn't a problem if it is a home server that never gets shut off.
@@gregdaweson4657 except theres no way to guarantee that. even enterprise data centers can and do suffer from power outages. boop, there goes all the data. still failing to see the advantage of RAM as a storage medium over an SSD, especially since SSDs have greater capacity than ram.
@@xyeahtony1 RAM is still faster, though. Buuut a hardware implementation like this IS practically useless, especially when drivers exist to create software RAMdisks that can be used, for example, to effectively eliminate storage bottlenecks in realtime video recording where you could potentially miss frames to slow storage.
Also, Windows already uses virtual RAMdisks in its recovery and installation CD modes. This is great for live CD systems because both Windows and Linux themselves are not designed to boot directly off of read-only media. So using a lighterweight version of the OS and faking it with RAM ends up just fine, especially since you don't want the changes that these live environments try to make to themselves as part of their normal execution to be saved.
RAM is also a great place to store your temp folder if you really wanna be sure it'll be gone every reboot.
I would love it if they made a modern version of this, working purely on PCI-E for data supporting modern ram.
Amazing drive. Now when FBI gets me I just turn off my pc and my data is gone.
@@budgetbajur oh yeah this is big brain time
good job Jared
This idea is actually kind of used. There's an operating system called tails os which keeps only a small bootable operating system in storage (you can have it on a flash drive) and all session information is kept in RAM, then when you log out it is all securely erased. Combine this with Tor and you'd be real hard to track.
@@sfadhjkl4112 Actually Tor is already preinstalled in Tails ))
You see Ivan, Americunts can no steal data when no data is there.
SSD: Who are you??
I-RAM: I am your father.
well played sir, well played. :]
You have a son??? You should tell the world...
I-RAM your father 🙈
SSD: Who are you??
I-RAM: I am your father.
I-RAM: And who are you? I already forgot.
@@Gameboygenius XD
Imagine something like this today with pcie 4.0 wtf even is load time lmao
Pcie 4.0 DDR5 and NVME to connect it LOL
Loading would be CPU bottle necked
@@KiwiPowerNZ That or the program's engine. Even the new consoles with their fancy SSDs can only load last-gen titles so quickly because the engines have no bloody clue what to do with so much throughput.
You can actually do it if you want. It's called RAM drive.
Actually, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference with current games and applications. For many games, even PCIe 3.0 NVMe doesn’t make a notable difference compared to a SATA 3 SSD
Mate of mine built a similar device for his 48K sinclair spectrum back in 1987. 16x 32KB RAM Banks switchable via just
OUT 220, n
where n is the bank number (0 for the Spectrum's internal top 32K of RAM.
Could Save to and Load from the banks using Sinclair's microdrive commands.
Battery backed up, so once you'd saved stuff to the RAM card, it could safely be unplugged, plugged into another spectrum and data loaded straight back.
Used 12v nicad battery for supply backup.
Whole unit was about the size of a shoe box for 512KB, and you could probably heat your house with it 😂
AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!
@@qwertykeyboard5901 was his first year project for his college HND electronics course. The kid blew my mind. Worked with his brother writing game software too. As far as I remember he did the graphics coding for a port of Robocop. If it involved code or electronics, he could turn his hand to it. Kid was a genius.
I was thinking the same thing; they offered stuff like this for the Commodore 64/128 back in the day. RAMdrives were the thing back when.
There's no better security than a RAMdisk with no battery backup
there's no better security than having no storage
@@haniffaris8917 no better security than having no brain ;)
Yup. Digital forensic investigators love them.
@@yessir843 I feel attacked
There's no better security then not having a computer
All these wicked inventions and I still download my RAM like an intellectuel I am.
just downloaded 13gbs of ram why isnt everyone doing this
I just downloaded 9900KS. For free! Look at those loosers who payed for it
@@uplreality2235 Most people run into Problems because they forget to Delete System32. Windows is using that Folder to store Ram-Configs in Order to check against legally purchased RAM and RAM illegally downloaded for free. A workaround to that is to delete that folder before installing new RAM to trick Windows into re-scanning available RAM and activating the illegal RAM in the process.
In my time you had the walk and get the ram uphill in the snow!
@@homer9736 I wholeheartedly agree
My biggest question is if any DDR2 through DDR4 versions of these exist. I could definitely see a DDR3 or DDR4 version of this being used as a burner computer and tbh that'd be a super awesome kind of piece to see in movies or video games
difference is that the ram capacity of those is too small to do anything with. Say you had 16gb of ram and upgraded, it would be cheaper to buy a 120gb ssd than to get one of these controllers
@@quetzalcoa the purpose isn't cost, its privacy and security. Yes it would be cheaper to get a 128 GB SSD. On the flipside a 128 RAM drive is usable for most day to day things for most people (apart from gaming) and the moment its shut down, it all goes poof. Have a base image (no sensitive items, only basic apps) ready to go for power outages and the like and you're good to go
@@Rippedyanu1 first, who has 128gb of ram that they could just use as a storage drive? Thats over £300 worth to use as a volatile drive? If you wanted a volatile drive with that capacity you could buy 30 drives 128gb ssds and just smash them after each use for the same price
@@quetzalcoa 1.) smashing 30 drives takes a lot of time, even if it's per use and 2.) Just destroying the SSD by "smashing it" doesn't guarantee the data is unrecoverable.
Both of those in a high stakes, low response time situation make that unviable.
Creating a RAM disk and then encrypting that would absolutely lock down whatever data you were worried about being retreived. It's not cheap but affordability isn't the goal. Unparalleled security is.
@@Rippedyanu1 surely if a ram disk was the requirement then just having one made on your systems ram is easier?
My first thought was that I wanted to know how they got around the volatile storage issue of RAM. I didn't expect them to not have overcome that in any adequate way. The battery backup having a two digit amount of hours of potential backup helps though, in case you needed to move it to another board or move the computer somewhere.
"I was too busy spending all my money on textbooks i'd never read for a college degree I'd never finish."
So... the usual college experience then.
I could count the nuber of books I bought on one hand, still got the degree after all. Yeah, that's the beauty off a decent public education system. :p
the north american college experience lul
I didn't buy a single book for my university degree, they had a digital library with everything you needed. I did my degree in the UK.
Even worse is finishing the degree but never getting a job.
That is such a big brain move by Gigabyte lol
That is actually a epic gamer move
we had it on 8bit ISA in 1986
I liked this comment in 4 different accounts and it actually worked lol
Big brain move is sponsored by the big brain action game, too.
At the time it was legit big brain, but yeah... It didn't age well.
08:50 Most anti-surveillance solution I've ever heard of.
This idea was ahead of it's time, they should make an updated version.
ps ram tray's were available since the 486 in fact we still have a memory card thats 8 megs.. goes on an ISA bus..
yeah before pci even... its actually called a ram drive.. and it was even included with DOS called ramdrive.sys
No point with cheap nand
It was way late. Similar devices existed in the 80s, for many different computers(mine happens to be for a 99/4a).
For that you might as well run the OS Tails on Live Medium, it doesn't save any data or changes like that, and it is based on TOR, pretty cool stuff
would just be a gimmick at this point unless you came up with some crazy niche market
i am sad. You are missing the hole security aspect of this hdd solution. I know places where they are still in active use today. With out the battery :)
And.... It's gone
Said the South Park banker
The security aspect of this was my first thought, its like a flash able virtual machine but hardware.
And upgraded version of this plus several simple boards and cpu, all linked to a master pc to monitor them and you break even the feared possible weakness of Qubes OS.
You can achieve the same with a switch and a powerful electromagnet. In my teens I was working on something like this. A hdd Killswitch with magnets. Fun but too expensive to test so it had one run and... Well I didn't think the idea through.
@sbcontt YT drive encryption is good but it leaves an attack vector even if brute force or social engineering for keys the beauty of this is there's nothing to attack its just gone.
@@norfolkngood8960 It also leaves you with the physical attack vector - give up the keys or die a slow agonizing death. It's **much** better to have the data loss in a credible way so that attackers are deterred - rather than incentivized.
I would love to have that card with ddr3 now
But I think a m2 nvme ssd is cheaper/GB
@@Damicske It may be cheaper that m.2 but not faster than four ddr3 dims
@@Damicske Also you can't unplug it when the police comes in.
@Viscous Shear Form factor. Gotta make it fit in the case.
@@FactoryofRedstone just raid 1 with an SD card.
Okay here’s the real reason for it.
FBI: open up
Me: let me just unplug my computer
smh just use full drive encryption fbi or shitbi cant open that then
If you're that worried just drop ya M.2 through a paper shredder
@@rickyyoung
That, will also destroy it.
@@hariranormal5584 Really ? I didn't know that.
Cold boot attack: Let me introduce myself.
It's crazy how much younger even 1year ago Linus looks. 2020 was definitely a wild year for all of us.
he has a beard now yeah
Just need to restart my computer here...
and…
It's gone.
That's why there is a battery...
@Chiriac Puiu true. But if it survives restarts, that's good enough
I must play that South Park episode v¥
Well, restarting won't delete anything, because your PSU still supplies power. It's only when you cut that off when it's gone.
Dual battery back up
10:26 "oh no i restarted it!" "its ok as long as it doesnt lose power."
powers it off anyway.
Ideal solution for a swap partition/file or a RAM drive. I think this was the main goal, not installing OS in a RAM :) I've actually would use that. My swap partition is only 8gig (I have 16G RAM), and sometimes swap use is up to 3 gigs. This would be perfect, since nobody cares about keeping what's on the swap partition during restarts anyway. It is pretty neat extention to the RAM you already have.
yeah, pretty expensive solution for a minor task. and that's the thing.
If you already have the RAM, just plug the ram into the mobo.
@@dylanrobson6737 Ok, Good idea. So I have a laptop that I'd like to get at least 4 more GB of RAM into. I've got a small stack of 4GB SoDimms, Right now, both RAM bays are occupied with an 8 GB stick each.
So... I have the 4 GB stick in hand, I'm looking at the RAM bays that already are occupied with RAM sticks. Where do I plug the third stick into?
Do you understand why Swap space is a thing NOW?
@@demitriuspandi9736 How was I to know all your slots were full? But I must apologize, I should have specified if you have empty slots. I have swap space too, but depending on how big you "small stack" is, you could sell them and buy a 16GB sodimm.
oh my lord, I could actually use this as a replacement for tmpfs on /tmp. Normally, it uses your system RAM, but you can configure fstab to mount any device as /tmp, not just a tmpfs.
You would just need to configure something to format the block storage each boot before mounting /tmp
would be interesting to see a more modern version of that !
Battery backed SSD with a massive DRAM read/write cache would be the same, but better. Battery so it can write the data to the slower drive if the power goes out, it reloads on boot in the background for instant storage access after warmup.
not an add-in card, but if you have a lot of ram in your system you can allocate some as a ram drive and do basically the same thing. I have 24GB ddr3 in my pc and actually i could make like a 12gb ram drive and still have plenty for general computing
edit-- a convenient Linus video, they even mention this video's very device ua-cam.com/video/6pp_krChw_A/v-deo.html
@@TheJunky228 you need to boot into OS to do that what if you want to make bootable DRAM
@@asadrahman6123 true
Asad Rehman Linux is able to do this, and perhaps Windows as well with some hacking. Distros such a Puppy Linux are specifically designed to be small enough to fit in RAM and don’t even need the boot device once it starts.
"SATA bottleneck"
*cries in IDE*
I would like but your at 69 likes so sorry
**Cries in SCSI**
Not anymore, though, but I used to own a Mac with that connector on it back then 😐😐
@Anand Raj flexes in nvme
I once looked for IDE ssd on Google and turns out it actually exists and does boot. I wonder what brain damaged engineer invented such a stupid thing.
Probably made for industrial computers, a lot of older motherboards don't support Sara, and the attraction of ssds for this application is they're not susceptible to vibration (which is a huge thing in heavy manufacturing environments) and they don't usually wear out like hdds do.
I want to see this done but with ddr4 ram, and with pcie gen 4. It would be pretty neat to see.
imagine having to explain this to people. "PCI" "volatile memory"
Ddr4 is still volatile, so it's not like ancient tech or anything. Pci is also just an older Gen of pcie so not very hard to explain. I explained how a computer works over like a 20min presentation a few years ago, you just got simplify it and use metaphors
Betcha that's Yvonne at the end getting even for forcing her to host videos.
It's the Revenge of Berkel.
I vote James
Gigabyte meeting where this was pitched:
"That sounds like a RAM disk with extra steps."
"Well yes, but actually...yes. Yes it is."
"And we're paying you how much this year?"
Yes, but a ram disk with old cheaper memory.
Did you setup a RAM disk back in the day?
The first generation So775 Intel boards did only support 4GB, the second gen only 8GB of memory.
High density chips also were really expansive.
Besides, the only way I personally got a RAM disk running under Windows would require Windows to see all the memory.
This means you would need Windows XP 64 - which was the hell.
Or later Vista 64 - which took easily a year to get decent support by game makers and driver software.
This product was a dream back then, but I never got one either.
I thought RAID0 Raptors will do fine, lol...
This would be funny if it were accurate, all you've done is show how ignorant you are
Cutting off 1-3 GiB of 4 GiB of RAM just for the purpose of using it as a faster hard drive wouldn't have been such a great deal. And with this device one could power down it's PC without loosing als the contents of the RAM disk.
So I think it's not really similar but the idea was the same as with conventional RAM disks.
lol.. funny DOS came with ramdisk.sys I had fun loading Doom1 in ram and watching everything load instantly back when I had a 486/66mhz pc lol
I had a similar device back in the day. It was intended for servers and it acted at the drive controller for an IDE disk. (SCSI was coming soon, but never arrived.) It had ram and a battery and acted as a bi-directional cache. The battery would finish cached writes if the power was lost. I don't think it ever made it past the beta. My example had hand rework on the board. It was a lot faster than the bare hard disk for things like compiling C programs (about 10x as fast) and at boot up (about 2x as fast). It learned what files your machine would need after power on and pre-cached them as best it could, or so the typewritten xeroxed paperwork said...
Reminds me of the ISA memory expansion card in my old PC-XT clone. And, loading up a "RAMDISK" to speed things up.
"...too lazy to flip it on Craigslist"
This is why I have multiple drawers of things I'll probably never use.
my first thought was, "Who wanted to dial in to do that!"
The whole first part of the video i was like “but it’s volatile!”lol
Same. Was waiting to see how it held the data...
I had one of these back then, when i built then and used this for a development system.
Why do I keep coming back to this video?! It's fascinating !!!
"I was busy spending all my money on textbooks I never read for a degree that I never finished" 😂
Hmmm... I wonder if those two points are correlated.
i hardly read my textbooks... im almost finished with my bachelors too.
I spent all my money on textbooks that I read for degrees I was never enrolled in.
@Misan tropo I wonder when we were suppose to learn how to read them
This is literally how old cartridge games saved your progress before switching to flash memory (or even the lesser known SRAM_F); RAM chip and a battery.
Yup, and even though they can actually last for a really long time..the battery save feature will eventually give out and unless you know how to replace it, it'll never hold a save again.
Battery saves and flash memory co-existed for a little while I believe. IIRC even some GBA games still had battery saving, despite flash memory being used elsewhere on the platform.
Going further back, I remember reading that Sonic 3 used flash memory once but I've heard conflicting things since so idk if that's true.
EDIT: Fun fact, some games that didn't use all the SRAM available to them for their saves would exploit the additional memory they had to work with. The Gen. I Pokémon games in particular used the leftover memory for decompressing sprites, which is also why encountering various glitch Pokémon would mess up your save; the game thinks their sprites are massive and the "sprite" ends up overflowing into the actual save data.
FYI there was a newer version of this idea with 8 slots of DDR2 and dual SATA (2 or 3, can't remember) in raid 0, in a 5"1/4 bay form factor and with Compactflash backup when the power is lost.
I had no idea this existed, but around the time of this product, we used to set up small ramdisks to run programs off of if we wanted that sort of speed. You couldn't boot that way, of course, but I don't recall the demand for faster boot times being a huge issue then.
The 2019 version: same pcb but with rgb
Actually with todays PCI speeds and RAM speeds/capacities it can outpreform NVMe ssds a lot I think... Why they not making them and only making sw for to use ramdisk from actual ram
@@BaterieCZ A PCIe 4.0 X16 link has a speed of 32 GB/S. Assuming people can make a controller capable of all that bandwidth, it would be pretty awesome.
@@Vae1769 Idea: Make the battery rechargable so it automatically draws power from the PCIe lane to charge. Make it large enough for two replaceable rechargeable AA batteries and two DDR4 DIMMS on each side of the PCB, with a fancy aluminum heatspreader covering the whole thing.
@@UItEnthusiast And finally some rgb LEDs :D
@@BaterieCZ That's the most important part xD
I could see devices like this being used in security sensitive situations so you could instantly wipe your drive.
I actually worked in a bank that had a machine with one of these in it. It had a weird unix os that was amazingly fast and due to what we used the machine for it required us to depower and re-install the os fresh everytime it was used (daily).
@@stuartthomson4563 used to be good way to avoid viruses etc, now they are in your firmware!
Hillary Clinton wants to know your location.
StoreBrand lmao
Linux has dd to do that. RIP data
Got one of these. Freaking awesome for a scratch disk for photoshop etc.
Haven't used it in years and would probably need a new battery pack for it.
I had two of these in RAID0, I was reinstalling Windows XP quite often due to the batteries on these things dying.
Edit: Google ACARD RAM disk, an even more expensive up market and more capable implementation of the I-RAM disk.
You are living on the edge aren't you?
I have one of these as well... a 9010 that was gotten with 24gb ram for about $100. Works great as a large drive cache.
@@Chozo4 : Yeah, extra cache for drives, ram disks for temporary working files, and memory expansions for data-heavy processing have always seemed more reasonable use-cases than a boot drive.
If I recall, the Commodore Amiga had something very similar way back in 1985, in the form of its 'RAM Disk'. Awesome machine :)
I used to copy some stuff into Amiga RAMdisk at bootup and then had it speak, "Consider it RAMmed, sir!"
If this thing had support for DDR2, I'd love to find one for a project I'm working on! Doing some research on cold boot attacks on ram, where you freeze dimms with decrypted data loaded by the system and transplant them to a system configured to dump the ram stick's contents. My target is DDR2, so something like this would make it so easy for me!
I could see a SQL TEMP database being put on that and going quite well. A startup script that formats and assigns a drive letter, then starts the SQL service would take care of the little problem of volatility.
"profits are down. we need a new idea."
"lets use ram as a boot drive"
Next step: run their entire Minecraft server off a 1 TB ramdrive xD
@@alhuno1 a lot of people on big server actually do that, with it being backup to a drive every certain amount of time, saves SSD writes
Linus: "No Windows XP Driver for the Titan XP graphics card..."
Me: Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME! Really...
False advertisement :P
XD
They DO have XP drivers up to the GTX 1080 tho, custom version of 368.91. Maybe someone'll mod drivers for the Titan soon!
@aaron 71 Well, of all graphics cards, this would be the one to do it for...
What about Windows XP on a virtual drive? Or would that be over-thinking it?
But can they RAID???
Imagine having to reinstall your OS every time you wanted to use your computer.
Tails
@@swagner3934 exactly
This has a battery backup.
Linus: 4:55 "Meaning you can't just treat this thing exactly the way you would a hard drive"
So it's OK to drop a ram stick but not a hard drive.
Yes.
Linus drop both, he doesn't care.
Exactly!
anybody remember the video cards (agp i think) that actually let you use laptop dimm ram as video buffer?
Hot RAM? No problem. Linus hold anyway. Is good for health.
Ah, reminds me of the good old days when RAM was so cheap and I had so much of it that I used a RAM drive as a scratch disk for... I think Photoshop, since it refused to use my RAM, even though I cranked it way up in the settings.
I had a similar looking card which was a dedicated disk cache. The performance boost was huge.
This idea seems like it would have been more sound as a DIY SSHD than a straight storage device in its own right.
it's great for offloading all those temp files to, tbh...
Intel: we have optane
Gigabyte: hold my ddr1
"This slot was only suitable for power..."
PCI graphics cards: "Hold my beer"
Ty TheDM
AGP was released circa 1998 because PCI didn’t have the bandwidth for graphics.
This was a 2006 product.
Firewire
@@mattbireta there was a gt 610 pci, i can only guess it was just used for more monitors on old AF systems, there was even a more powerful (but not faster due to PCI bottleneck) gt 430 pci
I had ISA Sound Blaster audio cards that had a single SIMM card slot on it.
I remember that! For 'soundfonts' or something along those lines.
I have an old Elektor electronics magazine from early 90's that have a project for a 1.44M solid state drive installed on ISA slot. It was designed to use static RAM and ran on old PC-XT computers.
I remember wanting one of these when they came out. Remember some had a cmos type battery (CR2032) on them.
Thst was for ddr2 version
that would be perfect if you were doing some shady stuff on the internet. Everything just vanishes away lol
....I'll take 2....
right
You can use ramroot on a full arch Linux install on a flash drive.
It basically loads the whole root directory to the ram on boot so you can pop the flash drive out and do your shady shit without anything being written to swap
You do know anyone may use RAM disk these days, right?
@@philipcooper8297 not as your boot disk.
You could make a ram disk in Linux or windows then create a virtual machine whose virtual disk is contained on the ram disk.
Qcow2 does have a good bit of overhead tho so it probably wouldn't be exactly the same
Oh hell. In 1986 I had a 8088 xt with a 2 megabyte RAM card. Forerunner to this card by about 20 years. Wrote a DOS batch file that’d let me load WordPerfect disc by disc until all 6 were in. Spellchecks for writing projects was a joy.
I set up some of those in workstations for a photography company back in the day. I set them up as the scratch disk for photoshop. It really helped photoshop performance. They did have a battery backup but I am unsure how long it lasted. No important data was stored on it so not a big deal there.
this thing sounds like the perfect candidate for a linux distro
I would use windows XP for gaming and I played around with a virtualized linux distro my friend showed me, the distro was like 400 mb for the entire thing, so I just left it on my 100 gig hard drive. I think it was called 'damn small linux' and since then various 'tiny linux' showed up.
I used several of these. They were DRAMATICALLY faster than any hard drive, even in RAID... at least for our application. We used these for a specific database application that had HUGE numbers of lookups on relatively small records. This was a read-only database that was updated monthly. The database was only about 3.5 GB, so the 4GB worked perfectly. We also used a program that would completely restore the data to the drive (an image) should the machine lose power.
The same could have been achieved with a normal Ram Disk, but at the time 4GB was the max that could be used (save servers with PAE), so there wasn't enough memory onboard to accommodate both the Ram Disk and the OS and programs. And since the 4GB limitation of 32bit OSes was a hard limit of the memory addressing, that meant that EVERYTHING that used a memory address took away from the 4GB of RAM. This was a fantastic solution for a couple years for those with a specific need that emphasized the need for access times vs absolute throughput.
Within just a couple of years, USB flash drives had become fast enough that they could do the same job as fast or faster for much less money memory and hassle. I kept the last of the iRAM drives until just a couple years ago. I had no use for it, but it was just so cool!
This wasn't the first card like this though. In the '80 I owned a board sold by Everex that could hold 3MB of memory and loaded drivers on boot (DOS) that configured the RAM as a drive. Note that at the time my computer only had 1MB of memory. The data on the drive was accessed by the use of the configuration of an Expanded Memory Manager that also loaded on boot. This manager would set aside a 16KB window in the address space above 640K and swap out 16KB of data at a time, as needed by the CPU. This was ridiculously expensive (I think RAM was around $800/MB at the time) but it was faster than anything else available on the market.
www.biocomp.net/o77185.htm
@asterixxer , wherever you are from, I can pretty well guarantee you that your English is far better than my grasp of your national language. I humbly bow to your linguistic ability!
ISA sound cards often accepted RAM sticks too, to expand their sample memory.
All these years I thought DDR2 was R2-D2's well endowed cousin
great comment
I get nostalgic when I see Windows XP. So many wonderful memories, it was pure love (mostly).
Linus: "No Windows XP Driver for the Titan XP graphics card..."
Me: Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME! Really...
My computer (Dell Latitude D610), runs both Windows XP and Windows 7.
Was glad to see the back of 98SE/ME when XP popped up networking with those was a right pain in the bum. I remember downloading ore release XP the day I got ADSL at 512Kbps
3D pipes
God no. By the time SP3 came around to make things stable, Win 2000 pro was the only option.
That card brought back memories of an even older time when I had 2.5MB card slot on a 16 bit ISA slot for my Epson Equity II+(286).... Wing commander was hyper fast on that thing.
I would have loved to get something like this in the mid 2000s when I had tons of spare SD-RAM modules.
Would have made a great drive for the swap partition.
Losing the content on power down probably would not have been an issue in that application.
This was probably my favorite Linus video ever. Thanks guys, learned a ton.
Linus: 'This video is brought to you by: WoW.'
Me: Wait, that's Jay's thing xD
That was a cool option for hackers. Police is coming to your home, you plugging out the cable and all data is gone. You are clean.
a pcie ddr2 version of this would be interesting to tinker with. optane, dimm.2, ramdisks and conventional dimm.2 ssds would still make it obsolete but as a way to reuse older hardware for a fun project it'd be interesting
World of Warships: at least it's not Raid Shadow Legends.
Let's play Raid Shadow Legends!
Start now for free
@@roflBeck I know it's a joke but I'm so irritated that I'm still gonna vibe check you
Yeah I know I'm just quoting the ad for giggles. Only phone game I'm into is Honkai Impact, I haven't played it for weeks though lol.
I would love to see something like this in 2019
Yes please
It’s called a ramdisk
@@johnsimon8457 ram disk is on motherboard ram and isn't a dedicated card
@@johnsimon8457 Well no, I don't want it to lose data Everytime I turn it off
It’s called a ssd nvme
I remember this coming out and thought it was pretty neat!
In the '90s I had a board much like this but it was a cacheing controller for the hard drive and not a replacement for it. Its been a while but I don't remember it working all that well.
The one place where I've heard of something similar aka a boot RAM is for Internet cafes where they used it to completely reset computers each day.
“Don’t turn it off” - exactly what i was thinking
I think the SATA to camera flash card adapter option my we'll have available at the time actually. I had one that took one SATA and split it for use by up to four camera cards. Made an EXCELLENT boot option for my dual boot system.
7:17 my super actually genuine Windows XP CD
For those who watched the very end.... Linus movement-pattern...!
These type of cards existed way back, even in the 80s, The Commodore Amiga had several back in the day. Also many old school console cartridges operated on the same principle of having a small RAM chip backed up by a battery to save data. I think LinusTechTips did a video about this too.
we need more videos like this one love the ood pc parts bin
I'm pretty sure i actually recommended this product about 1 year ago, when i was trying to suggest some new and unrelieved tech on this channel. Great to see you guys capitalised on that , regardless if you read my comment or not.
Oh boy, I've always wanted one of these. Just the whole idea of doing this amazes me
What's the point though?
There is no way you can play games this way can you see yourself moving around files every time you install a game
Personally, I'm too lazy to delete anything so I have over 9TB of storage on my pc
@@RedEye761 There's more to having something that just efficiently using it. I'd be an awesome boot drive for my XP retro machine. Also, I'd have all my games and whatnot on a different drive then, no problem. On my main PC, I have all my games on a dedicated RAID0 hard drive
If you don't need a boot drive, then just allocate a portion of your RAM to a "RAM Disk". You get a enumerated disk in Windows that you can format to NTFS with a drive letter. Problem is, you lose it on shutdown. Windows 10 is pretty good about caching, so it's not really needed and thus counter-productive.
@@RedEye761 I run chrome on my ramdisk.
@@RedEye761 Nah, only have to move stuff over every time you shut the system down. With cloud sync on Steam, it's less of an ordeal that you'd think
I remember that the old Big Box Amigas (A2000, A3000, and A4000) had RAM expansion boards that would fit into the Zorro II/III expansion slots in the systems. These worked well but the fastest RAM fit on a CPU/Accelerator board.
Anyhow, the Amiga from the early days created a RAM disk (the size of the drive was what things you put in there and you could keep adding stuff until all your RAM was gone. It was also possible to boot from this RAM disk on a warm boot.
I recall similar units going back to the very early 90s using DIP memory, then 30-Pin SIMs.
Oh crikey, I forgot about these. I dreamed of having one back in the mid 2000s 😂
whew for a moment I thought he had excavated a RAM extender.
yeah, I remember setting these things up. The first thing I noticed was the missing battery.
Seems a good alternative for pagefile or swap partition, in context of its time
These things were legend when they came out, lol. Nobody actually had one, though.
I remember seeing these in Hong Kong years ago. I almost bought one.
lol
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Linus needs a cinematic glint in his eye when he mentions the LTT store merchandise. Lol