Re: Cheap RAM disk?

On Tue, 2005-07-26 at 11:34 -0500, John A Meinel wrote:
> I saw a review of a relatively inexpensive RAM disk over at
> anandtech.com, the Gigabyte i-RAM
> http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
>
> Basically, it is a PCI card, which takes standard DDR RAM, and has a
> SATA port on it, so that to the system, it looks like a normal SATA drive.
>
> The card costs about $100-150, and you fill it with your own ram, so for
> a 4GB (max size) disk, it costs around $500. Looking for solid state
> storage devices, the cheapest I found was around $5k for 2GB.
>
> Gigabyte claims that the battery backup can last up to 16h, which seems
> decent, if not really long (the $5k solution has a built-in harddrive so
> that if the power goes out, it uses the battery power to copy the
> ramdisk onto the harddrive for more permanent storage).
>
> Anyway, would something like this be reasonable as a drive for storing
> pg_xlog? With 4GB you could have as many as 256 checkpoint segments.

I haven't tried this product, but the microbenchmarks seem truly slow.
I think you would get a similar benefit by simply sticking a 1GB or 2GB
DIMM -- battery-backed, of course -- in your RAID controller.

-jwb