SSD vs. RAM

[ThatGmodGuy]

Alright, so I was talking with a friend on skype, and he thinks that, somehow, humanity has no idea how RAM is faster than SSD. To quote him exactly:

"I want to figure out why ram is so fast and figure out a way to create a special ram and make a storage devise that has speeds 8x faster than ssd"

"I can reaserch and patent It then get funding and why"

I then sent him these links:
http://www.overclock.net/t/665938/how-is-ram-faster-than-an-ssd
http://serverfault.com/questions/267569/why-is-ram-disk-so-much-faster-than-an-ssd-drive

To which he responded:

"Ssd uses data, which limits the speed that it can operate at so I would use PC why wouldn't it be made my myself and so what?"

"Thus the custom ram that had a way of powering it or creating something along the lines of ram that could save stuff and not she erased whenever there isn't any power."

I know, it is gibberish. But, I wanted to confirm, my friend is incorrect about these points, right?
Thanks, ThatGmodGuy

 

[vmem]

two things:

1. a lot of why SSD is "slower" has to do with limited bandwidth. SATA3 only has upto 6gb/s of bandwidth so little research has gone into making it faster than that. we saw at computex this year that Adata is starting look into utilizing PCIe3.0's bandwidth to make use of faster SSDs again. this would be very interesting to say the last.

2. RAM doesn't need any type of longterm storage. there's a lot of architectural and usage differences between RAM and data-disks.

I'm not sure what your friend is trying to say, but it's not like companies has no idea how to make a faster SSD, there's just been no economical reason to do so: Intel has to support it on a chipset, there has to be available bandwidth to deal with the data flow, the new SSDs would need to be power efficient, and then there's the cost of making them. There's also the issue of failure rate, which is significantly less of an issue on RAM.

anyway, good luck with your friend's pet project, I suggest giving him $10 as a "start-up fund", then buy some beer and popcorn and watch the show

 

[ThatGmodGuy]

two things:

1. a lot of why SSD is "slower" has to do with limited bandwidth. SATA3 only has upto 6gb/s of bandwidth so little research has gone into making it faster than that. we saw at computex this year that Adata is starting look into utilizing PCIe3.0's bandwidth to make use of faster SSDs again. this would be very interesting to say the last.

2. RAM doesn't need any type of longterm storage. there's a lot of architectural and usage differences between RAM and data-disks.

I'm not sure what your friend is trying to say, but it's not like companies has no idea how to make a faster SSD, there's just been no economical reason to do so: Intel has to support it on a chipset, there has to be available bandwidth to deal with the data flow, the new SSDs would need to be power efficient, and then there's the cost of making them. There's also the issue of failure rate, which is significantly less of an issue on RAM.

THANK YOU! I don't have a lot of knowledge about storage, I understand GPU's and Mice/Keyboards better, so that was not my field of knowledge.

anyway, good luck with your friend's pet project, I suggest giving him $10 as a "start-up fund", then buy some beer and popcorn and watch the show

Rofl! That's not a bad idea!

 

[chugot9218]

They are already developing non-volatile RAM which is what is essentially necessary for storage, they integrate capacitors onto the chips that allow it to quickly copy the data to onboard flash memory instead of simple clearing. But, if you think about it, it is still volatile, it just has a non-volatile storage it can pass it's data to when it is shut off.

 

[vmem]

They are already developing non-volatile RAM which is what is essentially necessary for storage, they integrate capacitors onto the chips that allow it to quickly copy the data to onboard flash memory instead of simple clearing. But, if you think about it, it is still volatile, it just has a non-volatile storage it can pass it's data to when it is shut off.

but it gets to enjoy that 27GB/s or so of memory bandwidth! I've always oogled at that. imagine the possibilities lol

 

[chugot9218]

Yeah it's pretty crazy to think about. If I recall correctly, proximity to the CPU is also a factor in the speed of RAM, which I would assume is part of the reason you can't really move it off the MOBO.

 

[vmem]

Yeah it's pretty crazy to think about. If I recall correctly, proximity to the CPU is also a factor in the speed of RAM, which I would assume is part of the reason you can't really move it off the MOBO.

I think you're right. it's always a huge thing to move the dimm slots just another milimeter further away from the CPU socket for heatsink clearance... one of the reasons why cheaper boards usually has bad clearance for heatsinks, since the cheaper components needs to be even closer to the CPU