Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tank!mimsy!haven!purdue!bu-cs!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!kolding
From: kolding@june.cs.washington.edu (Eric Koldinger)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Solid State Secondary Storage
Message-ID: <6911@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 89 21:13:23 GMT
References: <248@vlsi.ll.mit.edu> <13487@ico.ISC.COM>
Reply-To: kolding@uw-june.UUCP (Eric Koldinger)
Distribution: comp
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 21

In article <13487@ico.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
>Some time ago (late '70's), Storage Technology (then sTc, now StorageTek)
>made an animal called a Solid State Disk.  The SSD was built in an era when
>good fast RAM was a lot more expensive, but they were able to use
>relatively less expensive RAM - a lot of it - and build something suitable
>for paging space on IBM mainframes.  It was built to mimic the interface of
>some particular small/fast disk (or drum? I forget).  One key point is that
>if you use it for paging space it doesn't matter that it's a volatile
>memory system.

Several companies still make similar beasts.  At a company I used to work for
we had a copy of the main index for our database, plus some of the most
accessed files stored on one.  Sped up database accesses alot.  Plus, since the
main index wasn't changed too often, it didn't hurt to keep it in volatile
memory, with a second copy out on disk someplace.

-- 
	_   /|				Eric Koldinger
	\`o_O'				University of Washington
  	  ( )     "Gag Ack Barf"	Department of Computer Science
       	   U				kolding@cs.washington.edu