Digital hard drive (was Re: project)

[90taobri@wave.scar.utoronto.ca (TAO BRIAN T)]

In article <gj38901@pro-nsdapple.cts.com>, Chantha Lueung writes...
> 
> How about building a digital scsi drive with chips instead of a platter,
> less energy, fast, and include like a battery backup that keep the drive
> alive for months or years incase of power failure.

    It's been done already.  The problem is expense.  You can pick up
hard drives (external ones, even) for a lot less than $3 a meg.  This
"digital hard drive" you envision would simply be a very large
battery-backed RAM disk in a separate housing with a SCSI connector.  At
today's prices, a 40-meg hard drive will cost about $1000, assuming
$25/meg.  You can pick up at least a 660-meg drive (closer to a 1.2-gig)
or a 128-meg magneto-optical for the same amount of money.  It was no
doubt targeted for workstations and high-end graphics PC's.  I say "was"
since you can just stuff your computer with mountains of RAM (one of our
IRIS 4D's here has 128 megs of RAM, one RS/6000 has half a gig...) and
achieve basically the same result.  I doubt the idea ever caught on.
--
Brian Tao:: taob@io.org (Internex Online, 416-363-3783, 10 lines, v.32bis)
::::::::::: 90taobri@wave.scar.utoronto.ca (University of Toronto, 9T4)