SanDisk's ULLtraDIMM is an SSD on a memory stick

[A Guy]

It's an SSD, it's a DIMM, it's... both? SanDisk's new ULLtraDIMM storage device puts non-volatile flash on a DDR3 memory module. We'll indulge the funky capitalization, because the concept is kind of cool. It's also fairly straightforward. Instead of serving up flash storage via Serial ATA or PCI Express, the ULLtraDIMM takes a more direct path to the CPU through its memory interface.

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A Guy

 

[Layback Bear]

Very interesting.

 

[spencer1]

Very interesting.

Hmmm... yes, verrry.

 

[whs]

Here are more details.

 

[Britton30]

Interesting, Interesting because I read the article and watched the video, now what does the ULLtraDIMM do? As far as I know we don't have boards that will boot from DIMM slots or that we can write to.

 

[whs]

Maybe you can make it work like a RAM-Disk.

 

[carwiz]

Putting the flash right next to the CPU gives the ULLtraDIMMs especially low latency. SanDisk claims a read latency of 150 µs and a write latency of under 5 µs. The modules are said to deliver 150k random read IOps and 65k random writes. Sequential I/O is pegged at 1GB/s for reads and 760MB/s for writes, so these puppies are pretty fast all around. Impressively, SanDisk claims that performance scales linearly with additional modules—and that write latencies remain consistently low. The modules will plug into existing servers, too.

Not as fast as I thought they would be. Probably because of the proprietary software layer (driver). Also, they're already near being obsolete since they'll be DDR3. I think I'll wait and see but the 200 and 400GB NVM ram disk is interesting.

 

[alphanumeric]

Why build it? Because we can! or Lets build one and let somebody else figure out a use for it? Nonvolatile RAM?

 

[MilesAhead]

Why build it? Because we can! or Lets build one and let somebody else figure out a use for it? Nonvolatile RAM?

I've been waiting for this to evolve. Instead of ram refresh cycles, caching of slow disk etc.. the entire system is non-volatile ram. Maybe a dram cache just to speed things up a tad. When you shut your system down it would only involve flushing the dram cache to non-volatile ram. Your stuff just stays loaded in memory. No hiberfile or even any disk drive to put it on.

I guess there would have to be a method to load from slow disk to get stuff that's stored on external HDs. But they should be "read only" and any copy to the slow HD should just be "parking." Like you download a program for the first time. So it is "parked" on the HD for permanent storage.

No pagefile.sys in this setup!