ZorRam - new memory board for Zorro 3

[Trev]

We have tried to limit costs of the card as much as possible so I estimate that the card will cost around US $135* which is far less than the crazy prices that the DKB 3128 on Ebay can go for.

But an onboard battery would have elevated the recoverable RAM disk to legendary status. ;-)

So, next project: memory addressable SSD interface? EDIT: Scratch that. Finding SSD devices that fit in the Zorro III address space would be a chore. Just throw a battery on the RAM board and call it done.

[Trev]

(S)DRAM uses quite a bit of power, plus you'll need the controller to continue refreshing. Anything beyond a couple of minutes would increase the price to no-go regions.

What? Don't shoot down my poorly thought out suggestion. ;-) You could push battery life into hours, but you'd need live standby power for normal operation when the system is "off." If your system has been equipped with an ATX power supply, you could pull it from there. The downside, I guess, is that the memory board will be pulling power at all times. That's no different than every other device in the house, though: TV, STB, etc.

[Trev]

@Trev

Why don't you just use some readily available & cheap CF card as recoverable 'RAM' disk?

Actually, I use readily available and cheap x86-compatible hardware for all my mainstream computing tasks, but that's not the point.

Having a battery on the RAM expansion could have other productive uses. A safe write-back disk cache is a good example; however, Amiga users are accustomed to powering off at will. Despite the performance gain, a write-back cache wouldn't be well accepted. It would have to be done as a caching disk controller with a soft power interface and firmware logic to manage cache flushes on startup and shutdown.