Has anyone seen a PCIe card for old memory that would allow inexpensive RAM Drive?

Rick400Tec

Has anyone seen a PCIe card for old memory that would allow inexpensive RAM Drive?

PowerSpec_MichaelB

Welcome to the forum, Rick. This is an interesting question. In short, I have, though they haven't been around for quite some time. Last ones I recall used DDR1/DDR2 (and DDR3 SO-DIMM's) and required a battery backup due to the volatile nature of memory dumping the contents stored within when the system was powered off. They looked a lot like this:

(DDR3 SO-DIMM model, $15k price tag when first launched around 2014)

(Gigabyte I-RAM, DDR2 DIMM model, $150 price tag when launched in 2005)

I am not aware of any modern designs that are sold anywhere.

If you are looking for an inexpensive, high-speed "RAM drive" type configuration, you can look towards software implementations. I personally use software called Primocache to use my spare memory as a block-level cache to defer my mundane writes to memory, preventing them from hitting my SSD. This prolongs the lifespan of my SSD while also boosting my write speed by a significant degree. You can do the same with SSD's to HDD's, using a smaller SSD to cache a larger array of HDD's for faster loading times while maintaining your larger storage volume. It's like having the benefits of the fast reads/writes of SSD's for the data you access frequently while still enjoying the benefit of HDD's cheaper storage capacity.

If block-level caching isn't your thing, they actually sell RAM disk software as well, but I've never personally used it. Block-level cache just seemed more efficient of a solution as it only cached specific blocks that were used more frequently rather than trying to fit the entirety of your contents within memory, allowing you to get much more out of your limited memory space while still reaping all of the benefits of the speed boost.

I recall AMD offering a similar caching feature with their StoreMi software though I do not know if it works with memory or if it is strictly SSD to HDD only at this time. There should be other alternatives online as well, I am just not familiar with them.

NOTE: I am not sponsored or affiliated with RomexSoftware in any way, I just happen to enjoy their product and use it personally.

Rick400Tec

Thank you, goal was to load windows 10 on it, with image backups, data on cloud. the cache'ing thing is over my head, attempted to use READYBOOST once, caused many errors and would dissappaer.

Used Ram drives back in early days 80s.

Windows OS keeps bloating exponentially. current RAM is expensive, was hoping older obsolete ram on a card might be more cost effective.