Hi all, just throwing this out on the table here:

A PCI-e RAM disk that could make use of your (old) RAM, sit in your PCI-e
slot, and act as a mass storage unit. A few years ago, there was this unit =
(
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=3DN82E16815168001), but the=
y
no longer make it. It only DDR2 and had capacity limitations.

Most consumer motherboards have a 32GB RAM limit, and it would be nice to
make a 512GB RAM disk for special tasks (like compiling in RAM, virtual
machines in RAM, other disk intensive things).

There have long been FPGAs with built-in DDR3 controllers as well as PCI-e
controllers. To build a similar device, for example, something with
multiple slots that can address more than 256GB of RAM would be nice.

How expensive and difficult would this be? Most of the logic is already
there, the only thing really is the electrical engineering (routing,
layout, etc.) considerations and the memory addressing logic which doesn't
seem too hard from what I know (I've built a simple memory controller on a
Spartan 3E for my PIC32 in the past).

Yes yes, RAM is volatile. Wouldn't be hard to include a small battery in
case of power failure, and do periodic saves to hard disk. Would be really
nice to run your whole system from RAM. Can get 256GB of ram for about
$1200. MUCH cheaper if you buy the older DDR2 from bascially anyone who has
upgraded. People even give it away for free, but such a shame that it has
no use any more on the desktop PC scene.
--=20
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