On Fri, 2002-05-17 at 12:33, ben goertzel wrote:
> ****
> One thing that I want to try doing is turning a solid-state disk array
> (not cheap by any means, but a lot cheaper than buying a box that can
> support and address, say, 128-Gb of RAM directly) and turning it into a
> giant swap partition on a 64-bit box. The idea being that this is a back
> door way to get really large blocks of addressable RAM without buying a
> mainframe, while being a few orders of magnitude faster than a hard
> drive.
> ***
> 
> Sounds very interesting...
> 
> How much would the solid state disk array you mention cost, roughly?


They aren't cheap (around $3-4k per Gb these days), but prices are
falling and this is still a few times cheaper than getting a machine
that supports large RAM sizes directly. The bandwidth is also very high
(e.g. 3Gb/s), and these storage arrays typically have an array of
interfaces so that you can utilize the bandwidth available.  The
alternative would be hack a network of cheap PCs into a single address
space, but to actually achieve the same level of performance, it would
cost you pretty much the same amount of money as just buying the storage
array, and less convenient to boot.

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com