There’s lots of news on the solid state drive front these days. Recently I wrote about tiny integrated SSDs and now, barely more than a week later, comes news of another form of compact drive from Viking Modular. This one is much more consumer-friendly though; it’s designed to occupy one of the DIMM slots that would normally be used to house your desktop computer’s RAM. They call it the SATADIMM.
This is of particular interest to space-conscious hardware enthusiasts; a DIMM module is very compact, far smaller than a typical 3.5″ or even 2.5″ internal drive. It draws power from the DIMM socket’s motherboard supply, eliminating one cable connection while making use of a single SATA cable for the data connection as any standard drive would. All this lends itself well to compact consumer-built systems, much more accessible than the integrated SSDs that for the most part would have to be constructed by larger hardware manufacturers. Ouch, that’s a whole lot of acronyms!
The upshot is, storage is getting really tiny. You can pack a whole lot of data into really small spaces. But there’s one more big similarity to the iSSD story we ran last week; there’s no pricing information to be found on this. There is no information on just how much data the SATADIMM will be able to hold, either, so I’m not breaking out the champagne and toasting the storage gods just yet. With luck these and other questions will be answered soon.
UPDATE (Aug 30, 2010): I received word from a Viking Modular representative that the SATADIMM is available in capacities up to 200GB. Still no word on pricing, but capacity is a pretty good start!
(Via Engadget)
I don’t see the point.
Motherboards would need to handle it separately to normal RAM. If the system thought it was actually just a giant RAM module, it would have problems with volatile vs non-volatile memory (i.e. it may clear it or it may not – some motherboards clear the RAM even though it’s non-volatile anyway to stop it from being frozen and stolen)
Even if it didn’t have problems with volatility, the system would not be able to use it as main memory, as it would be thousands of times slower than normal RAM.
This means that it would only be of any use in a motherboard that has specific compatibility for it, and can treat it like a hard drive and not like RAM, and on modern CPUs the memory controller is on the CPU so that would need compatibility as well (the physical tracks now go directly to the CPU and not the Northbridge, for Intel’s Core i and all recent AMDs too)
You may as well just use a PCI-Express SSD.
That’s not what I read. It draws power from the unused slot only. The dimm slot is just power and placeholder for the ssd. A seperate sata cable connects it to the mb. Essentially, one gives up a slot for ram for a ssd drive. I can see this for very small form factor cases.
If prices are at all competitive with regular SSDs, I think I’ll go this route. Much easier to add one of these than another drive even if you have the bay, plus I think the idea is sort of “outside the box” and I like to encourage that.
I’m somewhat confused as to how the motherboard is supposed to be able to differentiate this from standard ram.
The SATADIMM has to fit the form factor of the slot, but that does not mean that it must support all the electrical leads of the slot. All it needs to do is match up to the leads that supply power and ignore the others. It accomplishes all of its data transmission via SATA cable just like any other hard drive.
It only draws power from the dimm slot. It has no interaction with the bus or data pins. Data is moved via the sata cable between the top of the module and the mobo. Great for doing a build in a small or custom case, other than that, it’s a novelty.
Sounds interesting, however, what will be the capacity?! That is the big question. For all those home grown tv-media mini ITX users (like myself), the MBs typically have 2 RAM slots. So can 1 of these SATADIMMs be able to replace my 1TB SATA HDD?! With so many media applications out there, RAM is quite important on these systems, which leads to a problem. The MBs don’t have enough slots to support a SATADIMM. So do the MB manufacturers get on board and add more lots!?!
If they could fit some ram on there too, this would be great for mini motherboards that only have one slot. You could make one tiny pc.
Along those lines, why not have it pass-through all the pins to a slot on the top of it to plug another full sized ram stick, while moving the sata plug to the side.
I like this idea, but i would like to see it with built in RAM and an operating system!!
Would take a re-design, but if it happened it would be great!! I think!!
Along the lines others already said, i dont see the point of sticking this onto the RAM slot. The number of SATA slots is a lot more generous than those for RAM. If i remember correctly, my mb has only 2 slots of rams, and with this ssd, i will have only 1 left, which is clearly not enough.