Its useful if you want to play a less than 4gb game fast

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Surely this would have a built in battery to stop the data being lost when the PC is powered off?

look at the picture closely. there is a power port. the computer may be off, but it is still powered. hence the reason why i was talking about reliability. you will risk losing all that data unless you have a UPS.

But if the information is only held in the RAM, and thus lost if there's a power failure, then what's the attached "memory stick" for? Does that only save it when you actually shut your system down properly, or what?

no, no, those memory sticks on the card are the 'hard drive'. they are always powered, even when the computer is off because there is a power port on the card which looks like the kind a phone charger would go in. this is always connected to the mains. unless youre talking about something else, but those are the only memory sticks that i can see.

I think the flash ram might be under the heat sink. It mentions in their site that it uses regular ram and flash ram.

oh that one, yeah its most likely under the heatsink. otherwise what the hell is the point of having that heatsink in the first place?

quote hiigaran

no, no, those memory sticks on the card are the 'hard drive'. they are always powered, even when the computer is off because there is a power port on the card which looks like the kind a phone charger would go in. this is always connected to the mains. unless youre talking about something else, but those are the only memory sticks that i can see.

That is what I meant. But I don't understand why it would need to be connected to the mains.

I mean, my USB memory sticks don't need power to keep their data, so why should that version?

Or would the USB sticks lose the data if not used in a certain period of time?

those memory sticks are RAM. hence they work like normal RAM - primary, volatile storage. thats why they need power.

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It combines the blazing speed of 4GB of RAM with the backup confidence of 4GB of flash memory right next to it.

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You don't want to keep your data in RAM, because it will go away as soon as you turn off your PC. That's why it's great to have it paired up with some really fast flash memory, keeping everything you're doing saved.

That's what the page said about it.

It's not just RAM, it's 4GB of RAM attached to 4GB of flash memory. Flash memory is essentially the same as a USB memory stick, right?

What I was saying is that since apparantly the flash memory is what stores your data when the PC is OFF, the RAM doesn't need to do that, therefore why should it need constant power?

You'd think that since the RAM part of the drive is only working when the PC is on (otherwise your data is in the flash memory), it only needs POWER when the PC is on. And it would get that through the PCI slot.

So why does it have an external power connector? That makes no sense to me.

ahh, right. well think of it as RAID1. the flash memory is just a backup of the RAM sticks. now its making sense. if there is a power failure, the data is restored from the flash memory.

Another near record setting fall time low temperature all over north America these past few weeks.. Such warming!

Ram Drives are bad ass. A complete luxury, but totally bad ass.

The power plug might be for the extra power that the card would need to function. Similar to how video cards need the extra power from the PSU to operate correctly. Possibly the design on the board did't allow for any power ports so it's using an external power source.

**Edit: changed CPU to PSU... (don't know what I was thinking)

This message was edited by Nu Wa Rocks on Oct 30 2009.

Interesting find, I posted something sorta like this a while back maybe 5 months or so and it relates to storage of sorts that also fits in the PCI Express x1 slot and had 16 or 32gigs of storage on it, it was a tiny bit slower then SATA interface but the idea came across as a great way to back up your PC very quickly and the ability to move it from PC to PC as you upgrade keeping programs easy, the downside is if your motherboard would only have one PCI Express x1 slot you would be limited there since many people have like four hard drives these days any way.

Everything seems to be moving into the solid state area "less moving parts" and since the Obama Administration is pushing Green Technology like there is no tomorrow it will be more energy efficient. Is it possible to see the graphics card area move into having the ability to expand or remove a core and ram much like the ram and CPU of a modern PC's ? It is very possible seeing how the HDD just took a huge leap ahead.

I was skeptical about SSD (solid state drives) when i first seen one in a review last year and i recall lit being 32gb and was something like $600 but it was crazy people were buying those up like hot cakes then out of the blue this years the SSD all of a sudden got super fast and now there is a review of 24 SSD's in raid and was hitting 2gb a second that is totally insane, totally.