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From: ems@amdahl.UUCP (ems)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: New Product Idea: external ram disk
Message-ID: <1497@amdahl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 8-May-85 19:05:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdahl.1497
Posted: Wed May  8 19:05:15 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 9-May-85 04:04:34 EDT
References: <1255@eagle.UUCP> <1030026@acf4.UUCP>
Organization: Circle C Shellfish Ranch, Shores-of-the-Pacific, Ca
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> <>
> 
> The last time I looked in PC Week the prices of 256K Ram Chips were down to
> about $175 a megabyte (36 256K chips at <$4.99 a piece).  With all the new
> LSI ram controller chips, I bet you could put about 5Mb on a Ram Drive for
> under $1000 by the years end.  For the price of a hyperdrive, you could
> probably get a 20Mb ram disk.

The interesting thing in all of these discussions has been how
they emphasize the technical side.  This would/wouldn't work
because {it won't, no one would want it, hard disk would be better,
real ram disk doesn't go slow, etc}.

Here at last we have a posting that gets to the real question.
Would someone buy one.  The prices given look good.

As a more or less average Mac user (technically proficient,
but not a True Hacker) I should be representative of a
reasonable sized chunk of the market.  I would buy one.
Why?  I want a Fat Mac with fast disks.  I have a Fat Mac that
spends all his time looking like a skinny mac because he uses
a RAM disk all day.

An External RamDisk would be fast and would not impact my Fat Mac.
For mass storage, I would continue to use my floppys.
If the ERamDisk could do the compression on the fly (NOT impacting
the Mac processor) so much the better.  Why do I want one?
To reduce the number of times I have to wait while the disk turns.
It would do that. Where do I pay?

-- 

E. Michael Smith  ...!{hplabs,ihnp4,amd,nsc}!amdahl!ems

Tilapia Zilli is the way and the light.

This is the obligatory disclaimer of everything.