Has anybody tried using the GC-Ramdisk (aka iRAM -- four DDR DIMMs on a PCI card with a battery backup) http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Storage/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2180 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM Performance is much better than flash memories, but the price per gigabyte is much greater and maximum capacity is far less. It's really closer to the nvram cache on a hardware raid card than an SSD. The fact that it loses data after 16 hours without power is a little worrisome, although it uses a standard nimh battery so you can replace that with something that lasts a lot longer... Anyways, I'd be interested in hearing about anybody's experience with it. I'm thinking of using this for my md write intent bitmap and ext4 journal, with "-o data=ordered" so close() and fsync() return as soon as the data hits the DIMMs -- no need to wait for the disk to rotate around. Any comments? So often I hear debates about "hardware raid" versus "software raid" which are actually debates over whether or not you ought to have some sort of battery-backed write cache around. - a -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
