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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

These things were excellent back when flash had poor density and mediocre speeds; the cost per MB was similar when fully populated and it was significantly faster.

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Unfortunately SATA is the limiting factor. However, they would be awesome on the PCIe bus.

They were actually used? by who?

Caches, scratch drives for compilation or whatever other disk intensive process you had, etc.

Heavy industrial models were the ancestors of today's all-flash SAN arrays, later common in hybrid ram+flash. RAMsan was one of the major vendors.

CCP used one for Eve Online. They stuck their SQL server on it.

I think I've seen some in person in 2008 used for, IIRC, some form of coordination in Oracle RAC.

without any idea what a SAN array is was this used as a kinda hybrid ram, where you'd keep all your data on a real harddrive and then on system boot push it all to this where it would stay for years until the next system boot?

No. SAN = Storage Area Network. Essentially networked block devices. a RAMsan array would terminate multiple 1-4Gbit links and provide a very fast block device (possibly subdivided into logical devices) that would be used by other computers.

The contents were persistent, through battery storage + UPSes etc.

LTT was mentioned in another subthread; they also did a video on the i-RAM, one of the implementations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYbCYgYZVT8

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