Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tank!ncar!gatech!purdue!decwrl!pyramid!leadsv!laic!nova!darin
From: darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Solid State Secondary Storage
Keywords: ram, wafer, disk
Message-ID: <408@laic.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jan 89 22:20:54 GMT
References: <248@vlsi.ll.mit.edu>
Sender: news@laic.UUCP
Reply-To: darin@nova.UUCP (Darin Johnson)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Lockheed AI Center, Menlo Park
Lines: 25

In article <248@vlsi.ll.mit.edu> young@vlsi.ll.mit.edu (George Young) writes:
>So we are left with a box that is:
>
>	capacity of a few hundred megabytes,
>	word addressable,
>	much faster access than disk,
>	much slower than ram,
>	and around the same price as disk.
>
>It also should be smaller, lighter, and more rugged than disk.
>The Question Is:  What's it good for?  How might it be integrated into 
>existing computer (or other) systems?  What new systems or applications
>would it make feasible?

It would make a very nice paging device.  Since decent paging devices
are relatively expensive (we're talking fast disks, not SCSI or
ST225's), this would be a nice alternative.  Think about something like
common LISP on a personal computer.  Currently, most do not have paging,
and if they did have paging it would be to a slow disk.  A device like
you described would vastly improve the performance.  Also, it would
go over very nice with diskless workstations (even some disk-full
ones, since we're always short on disk space).

Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com)
	"You can't fight in here! This is the war room.."